ChatGPT users can now buy stuff without leaving the conversation. That's the headline. But the subtext is more interesting: OpenAI and Stripe just fired a shot at the duopoly that's controlled online shopping discovery for the past decade, and they did it by open-sourcing the infrastructure.
Key Points:
- OpenAI's Instant Checkout lets ChatGPT's 700 million weekly users buy from Etsy sellers and soon over a million Shopify merchants directly in chat, with merchants paying a small transaction fee
- The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), developed with Stripe, is open-source—allowing any merchant or AI platform to build agentic shopping without custom integrations for each agent
- This positions AI chatbots as potential rivals to Google and Amazon in product discovery, though incumbent platforms are already fighting back with their own protocols and restrictions
Starting today, U.S. users of ChatGPT can ask for gift recommendations or product suggestions and complete the purchase without jumping to another tab. The feature, called Instant Checkout, launches with Etsy sellers and will soon expand to over a million Shopify merchants including Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori. It's limited to single items for now—multi-item carts are coming later.
The mechanics are straightforward enough. Ask ChatGPT to find running shoes under $100, and if a merchant supports Instant Checkout, you tap "Buy," confirm your details, and it's done. The product is already ordered. Payment happens through Stripe, which handles the tokenization and passes secure credentials to the merchant. ChatGPT acts as the middleman—nothing more, OpenAI insists—while merchants retain control over fulfillment, customer service, and the relationship itself.
But this isn't really about shaving a few clicks off checkout. It's about infrastructure. And that's where things get complicated.
OpenAI and Stripe spent the past year building the Agentic Commerce Protocol, a new standard that's designed to let AI agents facilitate purchases without requiring merchants to negotiate bespoke deals with every chatbot that wants to sell their products. The protocol is open-source, Apache 2.0 licensed, and available for anyone to implement. Stripe merchants can enable agentic payments with as little as one line of code. Non-Stripe merchants can participate too, either through Stripe's Shared Payment Token API or by adopting the Delegated Payments Spec.
The bet is that commerce is about to fragment across dozens of AI surfaces—chatbots, voice assistants, embedded agents in email or calendars—and merchants need a way to reach all of them without rebuilding their stack every time. "Traditional ecommerce was built for humans," Kevin Miller, Stripe's head of payments, said in a statement. "Now, we are starting to do the same for agents."
That vision assumes a world where agents don't just recommend products—they complete transactions autonomously. The protocol supports asynchronous purchases, multi-merchant carts, subscriptions, and other complex flows. It's architected for a future where your AI handles the grocery run while you're in a meeting.
Agentic commerce has been building momentum all year. OpenAI released Operator in January—a browser-using agent that could navigate websites and place orders on behalf of users. Perplexity launched in-chat shopping last year and partnered with PayPal for payments. Microsoft opened its Copilot Merchant Program. Google, not to be outdone, unveiled its own Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) earlier this month, backed by over 60 merchants and financial institutions.
Each of these efforts is trying to solve the same problem: how do you let AI shop for people without exposing payment credentials or turning every purchase into a security nightmare? The answers vary. Google's approach leans heavily on cryptographic signing and detailed intent mandates. Stripe's protocol uses tokenized payment credentials that are scoped to specific merchants and transaction amounts. Different philosophies, same war.
And it is a war—over who gets to be the new gatekeeper. Amazon and Google have spent years leveraging their dominance in search and retail discovery, favoring their own products and extracting fees from sellers desperate for visibility. If shopping moves inside AI chatbots, the firms that control those interfaces suddenly have leverage to decide what gets surfaced and what gets buried. OpenAI claims its product results are "organic and unsponsored, ranked purely on relevance," but it's also charging merchants a fee on completed purchases. Sound familiar?
The incumbents see this coming. Amazon has already blocked AI agents from ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity from scraping its product pages, according to The Information. It's building its own agentic tools—an always-on AI assistant for sellers and a Nova Act agent that can shop across the web. Shopify added code to its site instructing bots not to purchase items on users' behalf. These are defensive maneuvers, but they're also acknowledgments that the battlefield is shifting.
Merchants, caught in the middle, are trying to figure out what this means for them. The Agentic Commerce Protocol is designed to keep them in control—they remain the merchant of record, they decide which transactions to accept or decline, they handle fulfillment and customer relationships. But they're also being asked to bet on yet another distribution channel in a landscape that's already crowded. Early adopters might gain access to ChatGPT's 700 million weekly users. Late adopters risk getting left out of the conversation entirely.
Stripe's role here is telling. The company processed $1.4 trillion in payments last year—equivalent to about 1.3% of global GDP—and it's been positioning itself as the infrastructure layer for the AI economy. More than 75% of the Forbes AI 50 use Stripe to monetize. The company recently launched a Payments Foundation Model trained on tens of billions of transactions, and it's been building tools specifically for AI agents since last year. Stripe's Agent Toolkit, released in November, lets developers enable agents to create payment links, issue virtual cards, and handle subscriptions with simple function calls.
By co-developing ACP with OpenAI and open-sourcing it, Stripe is making a play to become the de facto payments infrastructure for agentic commerce across platforms. If the protocol gains traction, Stripe benefits whether the transaction happens in ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, or some agent we haven't heard of yet. That's a smart hedge in a market where nobody knows which AI platform will dominate.
The open-source angle is also strategic. Google's AP2 is open too, but it's more complex and hasn't been implemented at scale yet. OpenAI and Stripe are launching with real merchants and real transactions today, which gives them a head start. The hope is that developers and merchants will pick the protocol that's easiest to adopt and has the most momentum, creating a network effect that makes ACP the standard.
Whether that happens depends on a few things. First, adoption. If merchants don't integrate, the protocol doesn't matter. Second, trust. Consumers need to believe that handing their payment info to an AI isn't going to result in unauthorized charges or data leaks. Third, regulation. Agentic payments raise thorny questions about liability, fraud, and consumer protection that regulators haven't fully addressed yet.
And fourth—maybe most importantly—whether people actually want to shop this way. The promise of AI agents handling mundane purchases is appealing in theory. But there's a difference between asking ChatGPT to find the best laptop under $1,000 and letting it autonomously reorder your groceries every week. The former is convenient. The latter requires a level of trust that most people aren't ready to extend.
For now, Instant Checkout is just that—instant, but not autonomous. You still have to confirm every step. OpenAI is positioning this as the "first step toward agentic commerce," which implies more autonomy is coming. But the gap between a smart checkout button and a true shopping agent is wider than it looks.
What's clear is that the old model—where you start at Google, land on Amazon, and complete the purchase—is under pressure. AI chatbots are becoming starting points for product discovery, and if they can close the loop on transactions too, the power dynamics in e-commerce shift dramatically. OpenAI's entry, backed by Stripe's infrastructure and an open protocol, means that shift just accelerated. Whether it leads to a more open, competitive ecosystem or just swaps one set of gatekeepers for another remains to be seen.