Mandates are AP2's core trust primitive. When you tell an agent "buy these shoes if they drop under $100," that authorization is captured as a signed mandate; when the agent later transacts, the merchant can verify the purchase traces back to real user intent — and disputes have a non-repudiable audit trail.
AP2 v0.2 extended mandates to "human not present" payments, where an agent executes autonomously under pre-authorized instructions — the foundation for delegated commerce at scale. Since AP2 was donated to the FIDO Alliance in April 2026, mandates sit in the same standards family as passkeys: cryptographic proof of who authorized what.
Because in agentic commerce the buyer isn't present at checkout. A signed mandate lets everyone downstream — merchant, processor, network — verify the agent acted within what the human actually authorized, and assigns accountability if it didn't.