OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Wallet — a new payment system that lets AI agents complete purchases on behalf of users in the US, starting today. It replaces Instant Checkout, OpenAI’s first attempt at in-chat buying, which the company scrapped for being too rigid. ChatGPT Wallet is live now, but only for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the US who have an eligible US bank card and are over 18.
It works through Dots, a payments infrastructure partner. Users add their card once. Before every purchase, they see itemized totals and the selected card, then approve with Face ID or fingerprint. Real card numbers never leave the user’s device.
Instead, American Express, Mastercard, and Visa generate one-time payment tokens, masked card numbers with unique security codes. Card rewards and standard bank dispute protections still apply. OpenAI says it plans to let users delegate full purchasing authority to agents later, within custom limits on spend, category, and time. The process starts with a natural-language request: ‘Find me noise-cancelling headphones under $300.’ ChatGPT then searches the open web, merchant APIs, or product feeds, surfaces options, and completes checkout either via browser automation on the merchant’s live site or through a plugin that supports structured cart actions.
That last part matters: many retailers still block AI agents as bots or reject their transactions outright. To fix that, OpenAI released a Commerce Partner Playbook, a technical guide telling merchants how to adjust firewalls, expose clean product data, and integrate with Stripe, Adyen, and Riskified. This isn’t new ground for rivals.
Anthropic’s Claude Duet, Meta’s Muse, and xAI’s Grok Bot already support payments, often using Stripe Link’s single-use virtual cards. Google Pay and Perplexity’s Instant Buy offer similar in-app checkout. So ChatGPT Wallet isn’t first. It’s late, but built from scratch, with tokenization baked in and a playbook aimed squarely at merchant adoption.
Availability remains US-only. No global rollout date has been announced. No price change: ChatGPT Pro stays at $20/month in the US, Rs 1,699/month in India. And no free tier access: ChatGPT Wallet requires Pro.
Not ‘ChatGPT free’. Not ‘ChatGPT app’ standalone. Not ‘OpenAI API’, this is a closed, consumer-facing feature, not a developer tool. It goes live as merchants scramble to decide whether to welcome AI shoppers, or keep them out.
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Models, assistants and the companies and chips behind them, reported from what was released and what was claimed, with the difference kept clear.
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