Payment giant Visa announced on Wednesday at the Visa Payment Forum in San Francisco that it has reached a strategic cooperation with OpenAI to embed Visa’s global payment network into the OpenAI platform. This means that after user authorization in the future, artificial intelligence agents such as ChatGPT can independently complete the entire shopping process from product search to payment confirmation.
According to the cooperation statement released by the two parties, Visa’s payment capabilities will be directly integrated into the OpenAI experience, providing developers and merchants with a simplified way to accept Visa payments initiated by artificial intelligence agents. Visa's chief product and strategy officer said at the forum that the changes artificial intelligence will bring to commercial activities will be more profound than the Internet and mobile Internet era. As artificial intelligence agents become active participants in economic activities, Visa's focus is to ensure that transactions are trustworthy, safe and smooth.
At the event, Visa executives demonstrated a typical usage scenario: after a user submits a request to ChatGPT to "find wireless headphones under $150," the chatbot can filter products that meet the requirements and directly complete the purchase on the user's behalf. This will officially upgrade the role of the artificial intelligence shopping assistant from "recommending products" to "executing purchases", covering all online merchants that support Visa payments.
This cooperation is not OpenAI’s first foray into e-commerce. At the end of 2025, the company launched the Instant Checkout function, but due to the high transaction error rate and the transaction fees charged to merchants were not widely recognized, the service was terminated in March 2026. Visa's intervention this time has solved the previous pain point of low merchant acceptance. Users can directly bind Visa cards to ChatGPT to complete shopping, and the threshold for merchants to accept artificial intelligence agent payments has also been significantly lowered.
In terms of security, Visa will provide underlying infrastructure such as tokenization, instant authorization and fraud monitoring. Transactions will run within protection mechanisms such as consumption limits, approval thresholds, and shoppable merchant whitelists set by users, ensuring that users still retain control when artificial intelligence performs tasks to reduce the risk of fraud and transaction errors.
Visa and OpenAI have not yet disclosed the financial terms of the cooperation. It is worth noting that Mastercard, Visa’s main competitor, has also launched similar artificial intelligence shopping payment functions on a small scale, but it is currently mainly targeted at enterprise procurement scenarios.