OpenAI said it will allow users in the U.S. to make purchases directly through ChatGPT using a new Instant Checkout feature powered by a payment protocol for AI co-developed with Stripe.
The new chatbot shopping feature is a big step toward helping OpenAI monetize its 700 million weekly users, many of whom currently pay nothing to interact with ChatGPT, as well as a move that could eventually steal significant market share from traditional Google search advertising.
The rollout of chatbot shopping features—including the possibility of AI agents that will shop on behalf of users—could also upend e-commerce, radically transforming the way businesses design their websites and try to market to consumers.
OpenAI said it was rolling out its Instant Checkout feature with Etsy sellers today, but would begin adding over a million Shopify merchants, including brands such as Glossier, Skims, Spanx, and Vuori “soon.”
The company also said it was open-sourcing the Agentic Commerce Protocol, a payment standard developed in partnership with payments processor Stripe that powers the Instant Checkout feature, so that any retailer or business could decide to build a shopping integration with ChatGPT. (Stripe’s and OpenAI’s commerce protocol, in turn, supports the open-source Model Context Protocol, or MCP, that was originally developed by AI company Anthropic last year. MCP is designed to allow AI models to directly hook into the backend systems of businesses and retailers. The new Agentic Commerce Protocol also supports more conventional API calls too.)
OpenAI will take what it described as small fee from the merchant on each purchase, helping to bolster the company’s revenue at a time when it is burning through many billions of dollars each year to train and support the running of its AI models.
