Paypal said on Tuesday that it is adopting a protocol in combination with OpenAI’s “Instant Checkout” feature to let users pay for their shopping directly within ChatGPT, starting in 2026.
Paypal is adopting the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open-source specification developed by OpenAI that lets merchants make their products available within AI apps, consequently enabling users to shop using AI agents. Meanwhile OpenAI’s “Instant Checkout” feature, launched in September, lets users confirm their order, shipping, and payment details, and complete purchases without leaving ChatGPT.
Customers can use their Paypal wallets for checkout, which, the company said, would enable it to provide buyer and seller protection, as well as dispute resolution. The company is also providing technology to handle card payments from within ChatGPT using a separate payments API.
And next year, merchants using Paypal products will have their products be discoverable on ChatGPT, starting with categories like apparel, fashion, beauty, home improvement and electronics. Merchants will not need to build any integrations, as PayPal will handle merchant routing and payments behind the scenes.
The company said it is also launching an agentic commerce suite that would let merchants feature their catalogs within AI apps, accept payments on different AI apps, and get insights about consumer behavior.
PayPal has been working to insert itself as a payments partner within various companies’ AI-enabled shopping experiences, particularly as people increasingly use AI apps to do their daily tasks. In May, the company teamed up with Perplexity to let users checkout within the AI search tool, and in September, Paypal said it was adopting Google’s Agent Payments Protocol to integrate its products within various Google products.
PayPal said, apart from the partnership on commerce, the company is giving enterprise access to ChatGPT to all of its employees and allowing its engineers to make better use of OpenAI’s coding tools, Codex.
“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,” Alex Chriss, president and CEO of PayPal, 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,” he added.
