PayPal signs deal with OpenAI to become the first payments wallet in ChatGPT (www.cnbc.com)

PayPal has struck a deal with OpenAI to become the first embedded payments wallet inside ChatGPT, enabling PayPal buyers and sellers to complete transactions through the AI platform beginning next year. The agreement lets PayPal users click a “Buy with PayPal” button in ChatGPT to purchase items and lets merchants list inventory without having to sign up directly with OpenAI—PayPal will handle merchant routing, payment validation, dispute resolution and package tracking. PayPal CEO Alex Chriss emphasized verified consumer and merchant identities, fraud reduction, and standard buyer protections (bank/card/funded-balance payment options and tracking/disputes), positioning this as part of OpenAI’s broader e-commerce push alongside recent Shopify, Etsy and Walmart integrations. For the AI/ML community this is a notable step toward “agentic commerce,” where conversational agents act as personal shoppers and complete end-to-end transactions. Technically it signals tighter coupling of large language models with real-world systems: payment APIs, merchant catalogs, identity verification, routing logic and post-sale support. That integration creates new opportunities—and challenges—for recommendation, grounding, safety and fraud-detection models, as well as data governance and latency/security trade-offs when models trigger financial operations. PayPal also plans to expand use of OpenAI’s enterprise tools internally, shortening product cycles and deepening the symbiosis between fintech infrastructure and conversational AI.