PayPal partners with OpenAI to let users pay for their shopping within ChatGPT (techcrunch.com)

PayPal announced it will adopt OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and integrate with OpenAI’s Instant Checkout so users can pay for purchases directly inside ChatGPT, with a rollout beginning in 2026. ACP is an open-source specification that lets merchants expose catalogs to AI apps; OpenAI’s Instant Checkout (launched in September) confirms order, shipping and payment details without leaving ChatGPT. PayPal will enable checkout using PayPal wallets (bringing buyer/seller protection and dispute handling) and offer a separate payments API to process card payments. Starting next year merchants using PayPal will be discoverable in ChatGPT across categories like apparel, beauty, home improvement and electronics, with PayPal handling merchant routing and payments so sellers don’t need bespoke integrations. PayPal is also launching an “agentic commerce suite” to publish catalogs across AI apps, accept payments, and surface consumer insights. For the AI/ML community this underscores a push to embed end-to-end commerce into agentic workflows: open protocols like ACP enable interoperability and faster merchant reach, while payment APIs and wallet flows create new production paths for agent-driven actions. The move also raises operational considerations—fraud prevention, privacy, and real‑time recommendation/intent signals—plus opportunities for developers to instrument analytics and optimize agent behaviors for conversion. PayPal’s broader AI tie‑up (enterprise ChatGPT access and use of OpenAI coding tools) signals deeper platform-level integration between payments infrastructure and generative-agent ecosystems.