The AI Agent Can Now Pay. Pine Labs Launches P3P
June 11, 2026 — Pine Labs announced the Pine Labs Payment Protocol (P3P), India’s first agentic payment infrastructure enabling AI agents to complete UPI transactions without real-time human authentication.
Protocol architecture
P3P extends UPI’s mandate framework (one-time mandates, Reserve Pay) to delegate payment decisions to authorized AI agents within predefined spending limits. Components include:
- UPI rails: Mandate-based payment and settlement
- Grantex: Identity verification, delegated authorization, spend controls, audit trails
- HTTP 402: Machine-readable payment requests for agent-to-agent commerce
- Revocation controls: Users can revoke mandates at any time
Live deployments
Gullak (digital gold savings) is the first production deployment. Users set rules such as buying gold when prices fall below a threshold; after one-time mandate approval, an AI agent executes purchases automatically.
Vijay Sales is running a proof-of-concept for target-price electronics purchases where agents strike deals when conditions are met.
Agentic commerce vision
P3P enables software agents to browse, negotiate, and pay on behalf of users — removing the MPIN-per-transaction bottleneck that previously blocked autonomous commerce on UPI.
Roadmap
Additional partner deployments underway across retail, fintech, and travel sectors. Future rails may include cards and crypto while preserving P3P challenge/receipt semantics.