OpenAI on Friday announced ChatGPT Wallet, a new payment feature that enables its "dots" artificial intelligence agents to make purchases on behalf of users.
The company built ChatGPT Wallet in partnership with American Express, Mastercard and Visa, and it allows cardholders to maintain their existing credit card rewards and protections. Eligible users enter their card information once, prompt their dot to find items to buy and approve each purchase with a security check.
OpenAI said its dots agents will never actually access a user's card details. Instead, their payment networks will provide the dot with a "payment token," which contains a scoped card number, security code and expiration date that is specific to a given transaction.
"Our goal here is to really focus on merchants and our network partners and start building out a really great foundation that's safe and easy to use," Chaya Nayak, who leads product for monetization and payments at OpenAI, told CNBC in an interview.
ChatGPT Wallet comes as a growing number of consumers are exploring how to use personal AI agents to manage their calendars, book travel and complete other day-to-day tasks. OpenAI introduced the dots agents during its annual developer conference in late September, shortly after Meta's Muse offering topped the App Store charts.
Purchases made through ChatGPT Wallet could eventually kickstart a new revenue stream for OpenAI, but the company said it is not taking a cut of transactions to start. With the initial launch, OpenAI is working to build relationships with merchants and position itself as a serious platform for shoppers, especially as vendors are beginning to experiment with personal agents.
OpenAI has pushed deeper into AI-enabled commerce over the last year, but some of its early attempts failed to take off. The company introduced an "Instant Checkout" feature last fall, which it quickly pivoted away from. By March, it had rolled out a revamped shopping experience that aimed to make it easier for users to find and compare products.
Nayak said ChatGPT Wallet builds on OpenAI's previous efforts, particularly around product discovery.
"We think that this is the next step, where if someone found something they're really excited to buy, then we want to be able to get them through to that endpoint," she said.
ChatGPT Wallet is initially available to OpenAI's Pro subscribers in the U.S. who are over 18 years old. The limited rollout is intentional, and the "right approach to make sure things are working," said Luke Gebb, executive vice president and global head of innovation at Amex.
OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot supports more than 1.2 billion weekly active users and nearly 100 million paying users as of the end of the third quarter. With such a broad user base, Gebb said OpenAI can decide to "turn up the volume" on ChatGPT Wallet when it wants to.
"It just makes sense to watch it, start it in a contained environment, and then keep rolling from there," Gebb told CNBC in an interview.
Merchants and vendors are still reckoning with the rise of personal AI agents, and some companies have opted to forgo them entirely. United Airlines said Wednesday that it will block agents from accessing its systems to book tickets, and Amazon prevents the agents from purchasing products on its platform.
OpenAI said Friday that agentic commerce is still in its "early days," and it published tools and guidance alongside its ChatGPT Wallet announcement to help businesses start to navigate the transition. The company explained how merchants can make sure their websites aren't inadvertently blocking OpenAI's agents, for instance.
"It's going to take time for the ecosystem to build the right infrastructure to be able to make this experience really amazing and seamless across all of their sites," Nayak said. "Really, who we are speaking to here is the networks and the merchants."
