Mike's Notes
This is an extract from a recent thoughtful SubStack post by Gennaro Cuofano, in The Business Engineer. The post discusses the AI advertising wars. This extract is about recent changes at the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation, a Linux Foundation initiative.
"What we’re witnessing is the emergence of a complete protocol stack for agentic commerce. Understanding how these pieces fit together reveals both the competitive dynamics and the cascading implications for the digital ecosystem." - Gennaro Cuafano
Note to self
- Create a Pipi MCP Engine.
- Look into the open-source protocols at the Agentic AI Foundation.
Resources
- https://businessengineer.ai/p/the-ai-advertising-wars
- https://substack.com/@thebusinessengineer
- https://aaif.io/
- https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-the-formation-of-the-agentic-ai-foundation
- https://block.xyz/inside/block-anthropic-and-openai-launch-the-agentic-ai-foundation
- https://agentics.org/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Foundation#Agentic_AI_Foundation
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_Context_Protocol
References
- Reference
Repository
- Home > Ajabbi Research > Library > Subscriptions > The Business Engineer
- Home > Handbook >
Last Updated
28/01/2026
The AI advertising wars
Creator of The Business Engineer, the deep-tech research hub, spun off from FourWeekMBA, the leading blog on business model strategy. Gennaro has over 10 years of experience as a deep tech executive.
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The Protocol Stack: Five Layers of the New Commerce Architecture
What we’re witnessing is the emergence of a complete protocol stack for agentic commerce. Understanding how these pieces fit together reveals both the competitive dynamics and the cascading implications for the digital ecosystem.
Layer 1: Foundation Infrastructure
The foundation layer has effectively been won by the Model Context Protocol. MCP, launched by Anthropic in November 2024, has achieved what few technology standards accomplish in a single year: industry-wide adoption backed by competing giants. The numbers tell the story:
- 97 million monthly SDK downloads
- 10,000+ active servers
- ~2,000 entries in the MCP Registry (407% growth since September)
- First-class client support across ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor, and VS Code
In December 2025, Anthropic donated MCP to the newly formed Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation. This wasn’t an act of charity but strategic positioning—by making MCP vendor-neutral, Anthropic ensured its protocol would become critical infrastructure rather than a competitive weapon that might be forked or abandoned. As Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, put it:
"A year later, it’s become the industry standard for connecting AI systems to data and tools.”
MCP now sits alongside two other founding projects under the AAIF:
- AGENTS.md (OpenAI): Adopted by 60,000+ open-source projects for providing AI coding agents with project-specific instructions
- goose (Block): An open-source, local-first agent framework
- Agent2Agent / A2A (Google): Enables communication between autonomous agents, supported by 150+ organizations
The significance of this consolidation under the Linux Foundation cannot be overstated. These protocols are becoming the TCP/IP of the agentic economy—essential infrastructure that no single company controls but upon which all higher-value services depend.
Layer 2: Payment Infrastructure
The payment layer remains more fragmented. Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), co-developed with PayPal and backed by over 60 merchants and financial institutions, provides secure payment tokenization for agent-initiated transactions. It’s designed to work seamlessly with Google Pay and the broader Google commerce ecosystem.
The payment processor alignment is telling:
- Stripe → OpenAI’s commerce stack (Shared Payment Token, Agentic Commerce Suite)
- PayPal → Google’s AP2 + Perplexity’s commerce features
This isn’t neutral infrastructure—the payment processors are choosing sides in the protocol wars, betting on which business model will dominate.
Layer 3: Commerce Infrastructure—The Battlefield
Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), announced at the National Retail Federation conference on January 11, 2026, was co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, with endorsement from over 20 partners including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Best Buy, and Zalando.
UCP is a full-journey protocol covering:
- Product discovery
- Cart management
- Checkout
- Post-purchase support
- Loyalty programs and returns (roadmap)
The architectural philosophy is revealing: UCP establishes a common language through which agents can discover merchant capabilities, negotiate supported features, and execute transactions. Merchants publish their capabilities via a .well-known/ucp file, agents discover what’s available, and transactions proceed through standardized primitives.
OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), launched in September 2025 in partnership with Stripe, takes a narrower approach. ACP is checkout-focused—it solves the “last mile” of completing a purchase rather than the entire shopping journey. The protocol is Apache 2.0 licensed and explicitly designed to work across payment processors and AI platforms.
ACP’s architecture reflects OpenAI’s strategic position: they don’t need to own discovery (ChatGPT’s conversational interface handles that) or post-purchase (merchants handle fulfillment). They need to capture value at the moment of conversion. For merchants already on Stripe, enabling agentic payments requires as little as one line of code.
The scope difference is intentional. UCP gives Google a reason to keep merchants within its ecosystem across the entire customer journey. ACP lets OpenAI capture transaction value wherever discovery happens.
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