PayPal announced on Tuesday a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to enable users to shop and pay directly within ChatGPT starting in 2026. This integration leverages OpenAI’s recently introduced Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) alongside the Instant Checkout feature to streamline the entire shopping experience within the AI chatbot environment.
The Agentic Commerce Protocol is an open-source specification developed by OpenAI that allows merchants to expose their product catalogs within AI applications. This protocol facilitates seamless user interactions with AI agents for product discovery and purchasing, transforming ChatGPT into a direct shopping platform. Complementing ACP, OpenAI’s Instant Checkout, launched in September, enables users to finalize orders—including shipping and payment details—without leaving the ChatGPT interface, thereby reducing friction in the purchase process.
PayPal Wallet Integration Ensures Secure Transactions
PayPal users will be able to use their PayPal wallets to complete purchases directly within ChatGPT. The company emphasized that this integration will support buyer and seller protections, including dispute resolution mechanisms, enhancing user trust and transaction security. Additionally, PayPal is deploying a dedicated payments API to facilitate card payments inside ChatGPT, broadening payment options beyond wallet usage.
Merchants Gain AI-Enabled Product Discovery Without Additional Integration
Starting next year, merchants leveraging PayPal’s services will have their products discoverable within ChatGPT across key categories such as apparel, fashion, beauty, home improvement, and electronics. Notably, merchants will not need to develop new integrations, as PayPal will manage backend routing and payment processing seamlessly. To complement this, PayPal is launching an agentic commerce suite designed to help merchants feature catalogs within multiple AI applications, accept payments across these platforms, and gain valuable consumer behavior insights.
Strategic Positioning in the AI Commerce Ecosystem
This partnership aligns with PayPal’s broader strategy to embed itself as a preferred payments provider within AI-driven shopping experiences. Earlier in 2025, PayPal collaborated with Perplexity AI to enable in-app checkouts and adopted Google’s Agent Payments Protocol to integrate payment functionalities across Google’s platforms. Beyond commerce, PayPal is extending enterprise access to ChatGPT for all employees and encouraging its engineering teams to leverage OpenAI’s Codex tools to enhance software development efficiency.
“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 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.”
FinOracleAI — Market View
The integration of PayPal’s payment infrastructure with OpenAI’s ChatGPT marks a significant advancement in AI-driven commerce. This partnership is poised to simplify and accelerate the online shopping experience by embedding payment capabilities directly into conversational AI platforms.
- Opportunities: Expansion of AI commerce ecosystems, increased transaction volume via seamless in-chat payments, enhanced merchant reach without integration overhead, and improved consumer convenience.
- Risks: Potential user adoption challenges, regulatory scrutiny related to AI-facilitated transactions, and dependency on AI platform stability and security.
Impact: This collaboration is expected to have a positive market impact by accelerating AI-powered commerce adoption and reinforcing PayPal’s role as a leading payments provider within emerging digital ecosystems.
