PayPal, OpenAI sign ChatGPT payments deal

PayPal has signed a deal with OpenAI to have its digital wallet embedded into ChatGPT so users can pay for items found through the leading consumer AI tool, the company told CNBC exclusively.

Shares of the company jumped roughly 4% on the news.

The agreement, sealed over the weekend, means that starting next year, both sides of PayPal’s ecosystem can plug into ChatGPT: PayPal users can purchase items through the AI platform, and its merchants can sell on it, with their inventory listed there, according to PayPal CEO Alex Chriss.

“We’ve got hundreds of millions of loyal PayPal wallet holders who now will be able to click the ‘Buy with PayPal button’ on ChatGPT and have a safe and secure checkout experience,” Chriss said in an interview.

The move makes PayPal an early part of OpenAI’s efforts to broaden ChatGPT’s use for e-commerce. The thinking is that its 700 million-plus weekly users can lean on artificial intelligence to help them find items, similar to a human personal shopper. Last month, OpenAI said its users could buy from Shopify and Etsy merchants, and two weeks ago it announced an e-commerce deal with Walmart.

“It’s a whole new paradigm for shopping,” Chriss said. “It’s hard to imagine that agentic commerce isn’t going to be a big part of the future.”

PayPal is attempting to position itself as a payments backbone for the coming era of agentic AI shopping, announcing recent deals with Google and artificial intelligence firm Perplexity. The fintech firm, which also released third-quarter results Tuesday, issued a release on its OpenAI deal after CNBC’s report.

The company will also manage merchant routing, payment validation and other behind-the-scenes aspects of payment processing for PayPal sellers on ChatGPT, so individual merchants don’t have to sign up with OpenAI, the firm said.

Chriss touted the fact that both consumers and merchants have been verified by the fintech firm, reducing the risk of fraud for either group. Users can pull funds from linked bank accounts or credit cards, or stored balances, to pay for purchases, and they’ll get protections, package tracking and dispute resolution.

“It’s not just that a transaction can happen,” Chriss said. “It’s that this is a trusted set of merchants, the largest merchant network in the world from PayPal, that are verified, with the largest set of verified consumers in a consumer wallet.”

PayPal also said it is expanding the use of OpenAI’s enterprise AI products for its employees to speed up product cycles.

At the launch last month of its Instant Checkout feature, OpenAI announced it was partnering with Stripe, which is giving users the ability to tap stored card and bank accounts to pay Etsy merchants.

Stripe calls its product, Link, a wallet and says it has 200 million users, but the service cannot yet store funds and has no consumer mobile app, so many fintech experts don’t yet consider it a full wallet.