- Visa-OpenAI partnership brings agentic payments to ChatGPT, Atlas
- Tokenized credentials and safeguards keep your money safe
- MasterCard announced similar tech last year
Visa has announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring secure payments into AI-powered and agentic ecommerce experiences, including those carried out through ChatGPT and the Atlas browser.
Under this new collaboration, AI agents operating within OpenAI products will be able to initiate and complete Visa-backed transactions on behalf of users.
It essentially lays the foundations for OpenAI to use agents to take care of the whole buying journey on behalf of users, including making purchases, payments and bookings.
OpenAI gets new access to Visa payments
It means developers and merchants will gain a new standardized way to accept agent-made Visa payments, but the payment giant stressed that safeguards would remain in place with controls like spending limits, merchant category restrictions and approval requirements all available to end users.
Much like we've come to expect the additional security of Apple Pay not to share our card details, Visa will also use tokenized credentials to avoid exposing the card's finer details.
"As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa’s focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell explained. "That’s the infrastructure we’re building with partners like OpenAI."
While we're very much in the early days of agentic payments and agentic ecommerce in general, piece-by-piece announcements risk leaving gaps in the broader ecosystem. This particular partnership puts Visa in the hands of OpenAI, but excludes other AI companies like Gemini and Claude.
Other payment providers, like MasterCard and Amex, would also need to get behind similar initiatives. A year ago, MasterCard did exactly that, announcing its own Agent Pay platform as a baseline for future agentic payments.
"By integrating with Visa Intelligent Commerce, we're building the infrastructure for secure, transparent, and user-controlled agentic transactions," OpenAI Head of Partnerships, Commerce Marco Mahrus added.
