PayPal Partners With OpenAI To Bring In-Chat Payments On ChatGPT

PayPal will integrate its wallet and card payment systems directly within ChatGPT, using OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Instant Checkout. Starting in 2026, users will be able to search, shop, and pay for products without leaving ChatGPT. PayPal will handle payments, routing, and protections for both buyers and merchants.

“Hundreds of millions of people turn to ChatGPT each week for help with everyday tasks, including finding products they love, and over 400 million use PayPal to shop,” said Alex Chriss, President and CEO, 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.”

How The PayPal–OpenAI Integration Works

OpenAI’s ACP is an open-source standard that enables merchants to display their products across AI apps. When users discover items in ChatGPT, OpenAI’s Instant Checkout feature collects order, shipping, and payment details inside the chat.

PayPal will enable users to pay with their PayPal wallets or cards via its payments API. It will also manage routing, settlements, and merchant onboarding behind the scenes—meaning sellers don’t need to create separate integrations.

What Merchants Get From The Partnership

From 2026, merchants using PayPal will see their products become discoverable in ChatGPT across categories such as:

• Apparel and fashion

• Beauty and wellness

• Home improvement

• Electronics

PayPal is also launching an agentic commerce suite that will allow sellers to:

• Feature their product catalogs across AI apps

• Accept secure payments within those platforms

• Access analytics on AI-driven consumer behaviour.

This move positions PayPal as a backbone provider for AI-native commerce experiences.

Beginning Of Agentic Commerce

AI-assisted shopping is changing how users discover and buy products. PayPal’s integration with ChatGPT removes key friction points between product search and checkout.

By embedding payments directly into conversations, users can move from “discovery to delivery” seamlessly, while merchants tap into a massive AI user base. For PayPal, the partnership strengthens its position as the default payment layer for AI-driven platforms — an area also being explored by Google and Perplexity.

Trust and dispute resolution remain critical as purchases shift to conversational interfaces. PayPal says its buyer and seller protections, along with its dispute-resolution mechanisms, will apply to ChatGPT purchases as they do to web- or app-based transactions.

The company will also manage compliance and payment routing to ensure predictable processing across regions, a step essential for both regulatory trust and user confidence.

Expanding AI Use Within PayPal

Beyond customer-facing integrations, PayPal is rolling out enterprise ChatGPT access for employees and expanding use of OpenAI’s Codex tools for its developer teams. This will help its engineers build, test, and deploy AI-powered features faster while maintaining internal security controls.

Challenges And Considerations:

While the integration promises convenience, it also introduces new questions:

• How will refunds and taxes be handled within AI-based checkouts?

• Will merchant discovery favour certain categories or price points?

• How will PayPal’s policies adapt to AI-generated shopping behaviour?

These areas will shape how “agentic commerce” scales globally and whether other payment providers follow similar open-protocol approaches.

PayPal’s collaboration with OpenAI marks a key moment for the intersection of AI and e-commerce. It signals a future where product discovery, conversation, and checkout happen within a single AI interface — while trusted payment infrastructure ensures safety and scale.

If executed well, this could redefine how users experience digital shopping—frictionless, conversational, and increasingly agent-driven.