Pine Labs launches P3P to enable agentic UPI payments

Per Pine Labs' press release dated June 11, 2026, the company announced the Pine Labs Payment Protocol (P3P) and described it as a mechanism that lets an AI agent complete a UPI payment after a one-time upfront authorisation. The press release states the system is "Live in production today," and frames P3P as extending UPI mandate frameworks including One Time Mandates (OTM) and ReservePay. Medianama and India Today report that Gullak (a digital-gold savings platform) is the first partner live on P3P and that Vijay Sales is running a proof of concept. Medianama also reports P3P is currently live on UPI ReservePay only, with other rails and features on the roadmap.

Per Pine Labs' documentation and press materials, P3P assembles three components: UPI mandate rails (OTM / ReservePay) for pre-authorised debit, a delegated-identity layer provided by Grantex for verifiable agent identity and spend controls, and an adoption of HTTP 402 as a machine-readable payment request standard to let software discover and request payments. The press release quotes Pine Labs: "The consumer authorises once, upfront. After that, the agent browses, selects, negotiates, and pays. No human authentication. No interruption. No friction." Medianama adds that the user approves the mandate by scanning a code in their UPI app and can revoke mandates later; the protocol debits against reserved funds within pre-approved limits.

Reporting from Medianama and India Today highlights open questions: how will liability be allocated if an autonomous agent executes an undesired transaction, which parties will be responsible under existing UPI rules, and what privacy or audit requirements will apply to agent identity and transaction logs. Medianama notes Pine Labs describes compliance and auditability as part of the protocol, but RBI/NPCI interpretations and bank-level risk assessments remain material unknowns in public coverage.

Agentic commerce, software that acts on a user's behalf end-to-end, has been constrained by payment flows that require human-driven authentication (for example, MPIN entry). Public reporting frames P3P as packaging existing bank-debit mandate capabilities plus an identity/delegation layer and a machine-readable payment request format to bridge that gap for UPI-based agentic payments in India. Observers in coverage point to differences with other vendor efforts in agentic payments and note Pine Labs' claim of being "India's first" to close this gap is a market positioning statement from the company.

Practitioners and observers should monitor:

• •adoption signals beyond initial partners such as Gullak and Vijay Sales
• •developer documentation and standards uptake for HTTP 402-based payment requests
• •formal guidance or supervisory statements from NPCI and the Reserve Bank of India about mandate use cases, delegated authorisation, and dispute-resolution processes. Also watch whether other payment providers or platform players publish competing agentic-payment schemas or integrate Grantex-like delegation layers

P3P is a commercially packaged combination of existing UPI mandate rails, a delegated identity layer, and a machine-readable payment interface that Pine Labs presents as enabling autonomous agent payments on UPI. Coverage highlights that the capability is live with early partners while regulatory, liability, and privacy questions remain open in public reporting.