Relationship to Authorization Protocols

This section is advisory.

The agentic commerce ecosystem has developed sophisticated authorization protocols that capture the consumer's side of a transaction — who authorized it, what constraints were set, and whether the agent complied. LCP captures the merchant's side — what terms were offered, what obligations were accepted, and what recourse is available. Together they form a complete agreement.

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The Two Sides of a Transaction

Authorization protocols answer: "Is this agent legitimate and authorized?" LCP answers: "What terms govern this transaction?" Signed acceptance (Level 3+) binds the answers together into a verifiable record of mutual consent.

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Complementary, Not Competing

LCP does not replace or duplicate authorization protocols. The relationship is additive: authorization protocols establish that the consumer has delegated authority to a specific agent under specific constraints; LCP captures the terms the merchant offered and to which both parties bound themselves. Neither layer is sufficient on its own. Together they form the complete agreement.

No authorization protocol captures the merchant's terms, the mutual agreement, the dispute resolution process, or the temporal obligations that extend beyond payment. These are the domain of LCP. Conversely, LCP does not capture consumer-side authorization, agent identity, or the chain of delegated authority — those are the domain of authorization protocols. The two layers compose.

For illustrations of how LCP integrates with specific authorization protocols, see the per-protocol pages under Protocol Integration.

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Combined Evidence for Dispute Resolution

When a dispute arises, the resolution process requires evidence from both sides:

No single protocol provides all of this evidence. The combination of consumer-side authorization frameworks plus LCP terms records creates the complete evidentiary foundation that institutional dispute resolution requires.