Mandate

Pay A mandate in Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is a cryptographically signed, verifiable credential that authorises an agent to act on a person's behalf for a specific purchase step. AP2 defines a chain of them: an intent mandate captures what the user asked for, a cart mandate binds the agent to specific items and a price, and a payment mandate authorises the actual charge; the Checkout Mandate is a related object, created by the shopping agent, rendered to the user, and countersigned by the merchant, that closes over an immutable, hashed checkout payload (checkout_jwt) so all three parties can verify what was actually agreed. Mandates use the SD-JWT verifiable-credential format, with a vct claim identifying the mandate type and version (for example mandate.checkout.1). The purpose is to let a human authorise an agent to transact without handing the agent standing account access: each mandate is scoped, signed and auditable after the fact. Used by: ap2, ap2-checkout-mandate.