AP2 focuses on trust and authorization: a mandate is a signed record of what the user permitted (what, how much, for whom), so a merchant or payment network can verify an agent's purchase was genuinely authorized. It launched in September 2025 with dozens of corporate collaborators.
On April 28, 2026 Google donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance — the standards body behind passkeys — to keep it platform-neutral, alongside a verifiable-intent framework co-developed with Mastercard; around sixty organizations backed the move. AP2 v0.2 added support for "human not present" payments, letting agents transact autonomously under pre-authorized instructions. AP2 (authorization) and x402 (settlement rails) are complementary rather than competing — different layers of the agent-payment stack.
Not directly. AP2 handles authorization via signed mandates; x402 handles programmatic settlement. They can compose in a single agent transaction.