PayPal partners with OpenAI to bring in-chat shopping to ChatGPT by 2026
This move is part of PayPal's broader strategy to establish itself as the premier payments partner within the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-enabled shopping. The company previously teamed up with Perplexity for in-chat checkout and adopted Google’s Agent Payments Protocol to integrate its services across Google products.
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Payments giant PayPal is making a major move into the world of artificial intelligence commerce, announcing on Tuesday a partnership with OpenAI to enable users to pay for their shopping directly within the ChatGPT interface, starting in 2026.
Agentic Commerce: From Chat to Checkout
PayPal will adopt the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open-source specification developed by OpenAI, which allows merchants to feature their products directly inside AI applications. This integration will leverage OpenAI's "Instant Checkout" feature, launched in September, enabling users to complete purchases—confirming order, shipping, and payment details—without ever leaving ChatGPT.
Seamless Payments: Customers will be able to use their existing PayPal wallets for checkout. PayPal confirmed this will include essential features like buyer and seller protection, and dispute resolution. The company is also providing a separate API to handle card payments from within ChatGPT.
Merchant Discoverability: Starting next year, merchants utilizing PayPal products will have their catalogs automatically discoverable on ChatGPT in categories such as apparel, beauty, home improvement, and electronics. PayPal will manage all merchant routing and payments behind the scenes, requiring no integration work from the merchants themselves.
The company is also launching an agentic commerce suite to help merchants feature their catalogs across various AI apps, accept payments, and gain valuable consumer behavior insights.
PayPal's AI Strategy
This move is part of PayPal's broader strategy to establish itself as the premier payments partner within the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-enabled shopping. The company previously teamed up with Perplexity for in-chat checkout and adopted Google’s Agent Payments Protocol to integrate its services across Google products.
“Hundreds of millions of people turn to ChatGPT each week... and over 400 million use PayPal to shop,” said Alex Chriss, President and CEO of PayPal. “By partnering with OpenAI and adopting the Agentic Commerce Protocol, PayPal will power payments and commerce experiences that help people go from chat to checkout in just a few taps for our joint customer bases.”
Beyond commerce, PayPal is granting all its employees enterprise access to ChatGPT and enabling engineers to utilize OpenAI’s coding tools like Codex.
