PayPal partners with OpenAI to let users pay for their shopping within ChatGPT

TL;DR: PayPal announced a partnership with OpenAI to integrate payment capabilities directly into ChatGPT, allowing users to complete purchases without leaving the app starting in 2026. The integration uses OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol and provides buyer protection, seller protection, and dispute resolution.

PayPal announced a significant partnership with OpenAI that will enable users to make purchases directly within ChatGPT, representing a major shift in how AI applications might facilitate commerce.

Context and Background

The company is adopting the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open-source specification that enables merchants to offer products within AI applications. This works alongside OpenAI’s “Instant Checkout” feature, launched in September, which streamlines order confirmation and payment processing.

Users can leverage their PayPal wallets for transactions, providing both buyer and seller protection along with dispute resolution. PayPal is also enabling card payments through a separate payments API integrated into ChatGPT.

Beginning next year, PayPal merchants will have their catalogs discoverable on ChatGPT across categories including apparel, fashion, beauty, home improvement, and electronics. The company handles merchant routing and payments automatically—merchants need no additional integrations.

Strategic Positioning

This represents PayPal’s broader strategy to position itself as the payments backbone for AI-powered shopping experiences. The company previously partnered with Perplexity in May and adopted Google’s Agent Payments Protocol in September, demonstrating a deliberate approach to establishing presence across multiple AI platforms.

PayPal is simultaneously launching an agentic commerce suite enabling merchants to feature catalogs across multiple AI platforms, accept payments on different services, and access consumer behavior insights. This multi-platform approach suggests PayPal anticipates AI-mediated commerce becoming significant enough to warrant dedicated infrastructure.

Looking Forward

The partnership raises important questions about how conversational AI will reshape e-commerce. By enabling transactions without leaving the chat interface, OpenAI and PayPal are testing whether users will adopt AI assistants as shopping channels rather than simply research tools.

For merchants, the proposition is straightforward: access to ChatGPT’s user base without additional technical integration. However, the effectiveness will depend on how naturally product discovery and purchasing fit within conversational interactions.

Additionally, PayPal is providing enterprise ChatGPT access to all employees and granting engineers access to OpenAI’s coding tools, suggesting the partnership extends beyond the consumer-facing integration.

The 2026 launch timeline provides both companies substantial runway to refine the user experience and address potential challenges around product discovery, trust signals, and purchase confidence in an AI-mediated environment.

Source Attribution:

Share this article