Klarna is the latest company looking to stake its claim in the agentic commerce sector with a new open standard.
Klarna has launched a new Agentic Product Protocol, an open standard designed to help AI agents easily discover and understand products.
Announced on December 15, the protocol aims to establish a common standard which allows AI agents to find, compare and recommend products, while giving consumers access to live prices and availability across merchants, markets and platforms.
In an example shared by Klarna, a consumer asks an AI bot: “what are the top selling wireless headphones?”
The bot responds: “Here are the top selling wireless headphones this year,” and presents two products, each shown with an image, a price and the number of stores where the product is available.
Explaining why the protocol matters, David Sykes, Chief Commercial Officer at Klarna, said: “Before agents can buy, they need to know what exists.
“Klarna’s Agentic Product Protocol defines a common language for how AI systems, merchants, and platforms exchange product data – a foundational layer for the next generation of agentic commerce.”
As Sykes noted, the protocol is open to any merchant or developer which wants to use it. Klarna says the protocol already spans more than 100 million products and 400 million prices, standardised across 12 markets.
The protocol API supports Google Merchant, Shopify, Facebook Catalog, as well as CSV and JSON feeds.
Klarna says that by adopting the standard, merchants can make products available to any AI agent or platform which supports the protocol, without the need to reformat feeds or create new listings.
Merchants can also benefit from having products surfaced in AI driven conversations, with no ads, paywalls or intermediaries.
The AI ecosystem is taking shape
Agentic commerce is increasingly seen as the future of online shopping, with major payments companies looking to establish a presence in the emerging space.
Klarna’s approach has similarities to that of Visa, which has also opted to launch an open standard. In October 2025, Visa unveiled Trusted Agent Protocol, developed in partnership with Cloudflare, to help merchants identify and verify AI agents acting on behalf of consumers.
The move was a direct response to the increasing growth in AI driven traffic to US retail websites, which has increased by more than 4,700% over the past year, according to data from Adobe.
Visa and Klarna’s news follows Google, which launched its Agent Payments Protocol, also known as AP2. The initiative aims to standardise how AI agents initiate and complete payments across different platforms.
Not everyone is going open
While many companies are backing open standards, others are taking a more integrated approach to agentic commerce.
Stripe, which launched its own open standard in partnership with OpenAI in September, introduced its own Agentic Commerce Protocol, described as the first live standard enabling programmatic commerce flows between AI agents and businesses.
Earlier this week, Stripe also announced the Agentic Commerce Suite, a new solution designed to help businesses. The suite allows merchants to sell through AI agents more easily by making products discoverable, simplifying checkout and enabling agentic payments through a single integration.
Merchants can connect product catalogues to Stripe and then use the Stripe Dashboard to select which AI agents they want to sell through. This means Stripe handles discovery, checkout, payments and fraud detection, while sending order events back to merchants.
Worldpay has also entered the space with its own in house agentic AI payment platform. The global payments technology company announced the launch of Worldpay Model Context Protocol in November 2025. The protocol is designed to allow merchants to download, modify and deploy AI agents, enabling direct payment integrations from the point of sale.
