Sierra Publishes Poppy Draft, Adds 35 Partners Including…

Three days after announcing the Personal Agent Protocol, Sierra posted a draft spec and 35 new design partners. For small B2C merchants, a single /.well-known/poppy.json file is the new ante to be seen by shopping agents.

Sierra posted the first draft of the Personal Agent Protocol (“Poppy”) on October 9 and named 35 additional design partners, including OpenAI, Visa, Mastercard, Target, Nordstrom, Gap Inc., Bank of America, PayPal, Cloudflare, Okta, Zendesk, and Zapier. The release came three days after Sierra and Meta unveiled the protocol with a smaller founding cohort, and it reframes an engineering document as a standards fight gaining mass fast.

The draft defines five building blocks: discovery, sessions, sign-in, one session across channels, and a choice of execution surface. Discovery is the piece small merchants should read first. A compliant agent looks for a single file at /.well-known/poppy.json on your domain to learn what you sell, how a customer signs in (OAuth, with guest-to-authenticated escalation), and what the agent is permitted to do. The business picks the channel and sets the limits.

OpenAI’s appearance on the partner list is the political news. On October 6, Implicator noted that both OpenAI and Anthropic were absent; Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor, who also chairs OpenAI’s board, said he was “really disappointed” at the prospect of competitors sitting out. Three days later, OpenAI is in. Anthropic still isn’t. That’s a familiar sequencing from the Section 230 debates of the late 2010s, where early refusniks folded once the convening body added payments rails and distribution partners in the same week.

Two caveats sit in the fine print. Eesel, writing October 9, pointed out that the v0.1 specification itself is promised “later this month” and wasn’t yet publicly posted; the document Sierra shared is the design, not the finished spec. Finer per-action permissions, push notifications, and payments are listed as future extensions, not v0.1 features. Sierra says it’ll host design workshops and publish a reference implementation over the next month.

For a small B2C operator, the practical read is unchanged from last week, only more urgent. Personal agents are already knocking, and consumers are increasingly shopping through them. Amazon’s September 20 block of Muse showed the alternative to being legible: the door simply closes. A poppy.json file is becoming the business card agents expect to find before they’ll transact.

Sierra Publishes Poppy Draft, Adds 35 Partners Including OpenAI

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