Pine Labs launched a payment protocol, the Pine Labs Payment Protocol or P3P, that allowed AI agents to complete Unified Payments Interface transactions when pre-set conditions were met, the company said, marking a move into what it described as agentic commerce in India.
HOW P3P WORKED
P3P was designed to enable third party AI agents to act on payment instructions that users had configured in advance. Under the protocol, an agent could trigger a UPI payment without a manual confirmation at the moment of payment when the agent detected that the user-specified conditions had been satisfied. The announcement said P3P was now live and could be used for purchases where timing matters, such as buying digital gold when prices fall or securing a product when it reaches a target price.
The release contrasted agent-initiated transactions under P3P with the current UPI experience, which generally required users to approve payments at the time of the transaction. Pine Labs said users remain in control of the mandate and can update or revoke it at any time, and that the protocol includes controls for agent identity, spending limits and audit trails. The company described the move as enabling agentic commerce, a term used to refer to digital agents that act on behalf of users to complete purchases and other interactions.
P3P was presented as a protocol layer on top of existing payments infrastructure rather than a replacement of UPI rails. Pine Labs said digital gold savings platform Gullak was live on P3P and electronics retailer Vijay Sales was testing it in a proof of concept. The protocol builds on UPI mandates, Grantex identity and authorisation, and the HTTP 402 standard for machine-readable payment requests. Pine Labs has not stated who bears liability when an agent pays in error, MediaNama reported.
MARKET AND REGULATORY IMPLICATIONS
MediaNama noted that Pine Labs has not publicly stated whether the National Payments Corporation of India created or approved a separate framework for autonomous AI-triggered purchases under UPI mandates. Under the RBI's e-mandate rules, banks can process recurring transactions of up to Rs 15,000 without an additional factor of authentication once a mandate is set, but still require it above that amount, and it is not clear how P3P handles a single agent-initiated payment above that limit.
Rival Razorpay has offered agentic UPI payments since October 2025, first with NPCI and OpenAI on ChatGPT and later with Anthropic on Claude, but in those cases the user still gives final consent before a payment completes.
Sources: Fintech News Singapore; MediaNama
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