Visa Integrates Payment Network into ChatGPT to Enable AI-Powered Shopping and Transactions

Payments giant Visa announced on Wednesday that it has embedded its network inside ChatGPT through a new partnership with OpenAI, enabling AI agents to not only recommend products but complete purchases on a user's behalf at any Visa-accepting merchant. Users will link their Visa cards to ChatGPT, while guardrails such as spending limits, required approval steps, and merchant category restrictions are intended to protect consumers and minimize fraud. Visa will use tokenized credentials to avoid exposing card details and will handle disputes under its existing transaction rules, with modifications to its token framework under the 'Visa Intelligent Commerce' initiative to address scenarios where errors occur between consumer intent and merchant processing. The collaboration replaces OpenAI's earlier Instant Checkout feature, which was prone to errors and retired in March after merchants rejected its 4% transaction fee; financial terms of the new arrangement have not been disclosed. Visa's chief product and strategy officer Jack Forestell acknowledged that full consumer trust in autonomous AI purchasing will take time, with most early transactions expected to still require human approval before agents are eventually trusted to act without checking. Mastercard has announced a comparable but smaller-scale initiative called Agent Pay, focused on business-to-business procurement rather than consumer shopping. TechRadar noted that the partnership currently covers only OpenAI products, leaving other AI platforms such as Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude outside the arrangement.