Personal Agent Protocol Draft 0.1 vs MCP OAuth: what Sume grants

The Personal Agent Protocol (PAP) is a proposed open standard for how a person's own AI agent finds a company, signs in on the person's behalf, receives only the access the person allows, and then does the task. Meta and Sierra announced it on October 6, 2026. It is not an MCP replacement and Sume does not implement it. Sume's hosted MCP server already has a similar consent shape for an agent that calls Sume: sign in with OAuth, Read is on, Write is an opt-in toggle, and spend is never a scope.

What does PAP Draft 0.1 standardize?

The PAP page (read 2026-10-11) describes the whole interface between a personal agent and a company in four parts. It does not list payments, which it names only as possible future extensions. Datafloq's report of the announcement (read 2026-10-11) says the same about payments and says Sierra gave no date for them.

How does that compare with Sume's hosted MCP sign-in?

The overlap is the consent model, not the wire format. A client that connects to Sume's MCP endpoint at mcp.sume.com gets an OAuth challenge and protected-resource metadata, sends the person to a consent page, and exchanges the code with PKCE for a token. The docs say the consent page shows Permissions with Read locked on and Write off by default.

Two differences matter for anyone planning around PAP. First, discovery: Sume publishes OAuth metadata at its own well-known MCP paths, not a poppy.json file. Second, there is no payment scope to wait for. The Sume docs state that there is no mcp:paid scope; a paid job is gated by the workspace wallet, a required idempotency_key, and an optional max_spend_usd that Sume enforces only when you send it.

What does a read-only agent see on Sume?

With only mcp:read, the session sees read-only tools. Calls to tools that change data return insufficient_scope. With mcp:write, the session also sees the write and paid tools. An API key sees the full tool set, so the docs treat it as the automation path rather than the interactive one.

• Connect with OAuth and leave Write off to let an agent list jobs, read balance, and inspect tool schemas.
• Call tools_list to see exactly which tools the session can use.
• Turn Write on only for the sessions that should generate media.
• Send dry_run=true or generation_admission_preview before a burst of paid calls.

Should you wait for PAP before connecting an agent?

No. PAP is a Draft 0.1 and covers a different direction: a consumer's personal agent visiting a business. Sume's hosted MCP covers a creator's or developer's agent making media for their own workspace. If PAP later gains adopters, an agent that already understands read versus write consent will fit the same mental model. Until then, use the OAuth scopes that exist and keep Write off by default.