OpenAI's agents can now buy things for you

OpenAI announced ChatGPT Wallet on Friday, a feature that lets its AI agents complete real purchases on a user's behalf 2

. It moves the company's agents from researching and recommending products to actually paying for them, which is the step the whole idea of agentic shopping has been missing 2

Source: Engadget

OpenAI built the wallet with American Express, Mastercard and Visa, and purchases keep the card's existing rewards and dispute protections 8

. At launch it is available only to US ChatGPT Pro subscribers aged 18 and up with a US-issued eligible card. OpenAI says the narrow rollout is deliberate so it can learn from early use 4

How a purchase actually works

The user adds a card once. For each purchase, OpenAI's agent shows the items, the total and the card it plans to use. Every approval leaves a record of what was authorized 7

Source: The Next Web

OpenAI says the agent never sees the real card number. Once the user approves, the payment network issues a token, a one-off card number, security code and expiry for that transaction, which stands in for the actual card 1

. OpenAI is not taking a cut of transactions at launch; purchases could become a revenue stream later 3

OpenAI's second try at shopping

The dots agents themselves only arrived in late September at OpenAI's developer conference, so the wallet is a fast follow-on 2

. It is also at least OpenAI's second attempt at agentic shopping. Instant Checkout launched in autumn 2025 and was quickly abandoned; a March 2026 shopping effort was retired, per Quartz 8

. Meta's Muse, which has more than 10 million users and counts AI-assisted shopping among its top activities, got there first 1

What OpenAI brings is distribution: ChatGPT had more than 1.2 billion weekly users and nearly 100 million paying subscribers as of the end of Q3 10

Source: ET

The market isn't asking for it

The bigger obstacle for OpenAI is that many of the places people actually shop have locked agents out. Amazon does not allow agent purchases on its marketplace, Delta bans them, and Schwab and JPMorgan block agents from moving customer money 2

. Amazon blocked Meta's Muse last month, per GeekWire 6

Trust is the other gap for OpenAI, and it is measurable. Visa research found only about 23% of Americans trust AI with payments on their behalf 10

. The only hard demand numbers so far are tiny. Uber reported four rides and 500 Uber Eats orders from agents in one week in late October, out of about 320 million rides and deliveries 1

. And the agents themselves may not be up to the job. Visa tested 22 AI models as shoppers this month and they failed 42.8% of realistic test runs 4

OpenAI is building the merchant side in parallel. It published a Commerce Partner Playbook, including advice on how to avoid accidentally blocking its agents. It is also working with fraud firms including Forter, Riskified, Sardine and Signifyd, plus payment providers Adyen, Checkout.com and Stripe 1

. The company itself warns that some sites may block agent purchases unintentionally and that fraud systems may flag legitimate ones 10

. It also launched Businesses in ChatGPT, a beta opened Tuesday where companies can claim verified profiles and post product feeds 8

Not everyone is impressed by the mechanics. OpenAI calls it the first wallet that lets an agent pay without ever handling the real card details. Gizmodo pushes back on that claim: tokenization and rewards retention are standard in wallets like Apple's and Google's already 5

The launch, then, is the easy part. Whether agents get to buy anything depends on merchants lifting their blocks and on people trusting an AI with a credit card. On current evidence, neither is happening yet. "To deliver on the promise of agentic commerce, consumers, businesses and banks all need to trust the process," said Rubail Birwadker of Visa 10