PayPal Becomes OpenAI’s Latest Partner on Powering AI-Based Commerce
PayPal is the latest company linking with OpenAI on agentic commerce .
The payment platform announced Tuesday that it will soon allow ChatGPT users to use their PayPal wallets at checkout. The news comes just a few weeks after technology giant OpenAI announced that it had launched a feature it calls Instant Checkout , which means users don’t have to navigate outside ChatGPT’s interface to complete a purchase they had been researching on the large language model (LLM).
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To date, Etsy and Walmart have publicly announced that they have opted in on the Instant Checkout function. Shopify has also agreed to partner with OpenAI, and the two companies announced last month that they plan to onboard thousands of Shopify -integrated merchants once Instant Checkout ramps up. It’s not clear exactly when that will be.
As OpenAI and others go deeper on integration into e-commerce, it developed what it calls the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) alongside partner Stripe. Stripe has already committed to power some of the logistics involved with Instant Checkout.
PayPal will adopt ACP. In a September blog post, Jeff Weinstein, product lead, agentic commerce at Stripe, and Steve Kaliski, engineering lead, agentic commerce at Stripe, described ACP as a tool that “provides a blueprint for how businesses can make their checkouts agent-ready so that customers using AI agents, such as ChatGPT, can buy products directly from where they’re discovering them.”
For PayPal, that means serving as the payment provider of record for transactions and handling applicable issues directly with consumers and merchants, just as it has long done. When PayPal is implemented into Instant Checkout, consumers will be able to choose from multiple payment options, including their PayPal balance, a credit card linked to their PayPal account and more.
Alex Chriss, president and CEO of PayPal, said the move is a strategic way to ensure consumer trust and satisfaction as agentic commerce grows.
“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,” Chriss said in a statement. “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.”
In addition to the consumer-facing side of Instant Checkout, PayPal said it will aid the merchants leveraging its platform in making their products available through ChatGPT in 2026.
The company plans to handle “merchant routing, payment validation and orchestration behind the scenes” for large and small merchants, which it said will add millions of items to the swath of products consumers can browse and purchase directly in ChatGPT.
Google said Monday that it had inked a similar partnership with PayPal. That collaboration will see PayPal embedded into the Google Cloud Conversational Agent tool and its Agent Development Kit, both of which allow merchants to leverage their own consumer-facing agent functions for shopping.
For instance, if a consumer asked a merchant’s own commerce agent to find them a pair of shoes suitable for a gala, the agent would fetch results, then make suggestions about how to pay based on PayPal history. From there, the consumer would use PayPal to complete and authorize the transaction. In a blog, Google said the partnership benefits both merchants and consumers.
PayPal’s OpenAI announcement comes on the same day as its Q3 earnings, which saw the company beating Wall Street expectations and raising its guidance for the year. Compounded with the news of its OpenAI partnership, those factors saw the company’s stock up by double-digit percentages throughout the day.
