Visa Brings Payments to ChatGPT: AI Agents Can Shop at 175 Million Merchants
Visa and OpenAI have announced a partnership to integrate Visa payments directly into ChatGPT, with the aim of allowing AI agents to make purchases on behalf of users. The announcement took place recently at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco.
The operational scope is broad: agents will be able to conduct transactions at potentially any of the 175 million merchants that accept Visa worldwide. Under the terms of the agreement, OpenAI provides the technology to enable agents to interact, make decisions, and initiate purchases through ChatGPT, while Visa handles payment authorization and fraud monitoring at scale.
How Agent Payments Work
On a technical level, transactions use tokenized Visa credentials: the card number is replaced by secure network tokens, each linked to specific agents and use cases. This is complemented by real-time authorization and continuous fraud monitoring. Users maintain control through spending limits, approval thresholds, and restrictions on approved merchants.
Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Visa, stated in the official release: "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's goal is to ensure that transactions are trusted, secure, and frictionless." Marco Mahrus, Head of Partnerships Commerce at OpenAI, framed a broader perspective: "Commerce will happen in many more places and in many more ways than today, and agents will play an increasingly significant role in helping people complete tasks involving money, from shopping and payments to more complex transactions." The partnership also covers the enterprise sector: Visa's payment capabilities will be integrated with Codex, OpenAI's coding assistant, to enable developers and businesses to build payment functionalities into AI-driven applications.
The Context: A Previous Failure and a Crowded Market
For OpenAI, this is not its first attempt in this direction. Instant Checkout, launched in late 2025, allowed the chatbot to find and purchase specific items but was burdened by a 4% fee for retailers. Adoption remained low, and the service was withdrawn in March 2026. The new integration with Visa seems to follow a different logic, leveraging an already established payment infrastructure rather than building a proprietary one.
The agent commerce segment is already crowded. Visa operates a Trusted Agent Protocol with Microsoft, Stripe, Shopify, and Worldpay; Mastercard has the rival Agent Pay; Google has Universal Cart; Amazon is focusing on its own proprietary AI shopping. The competitive landscape now sees ChatGPT entering with one of the most widespread acceptance networks in the world.
Visa and OpenAI have not announced the launch date, pricing, user interface, or details on potential costs for merchants and customers.