Key takeaways: OpenAI has officially announced the ChatGPT wallet, a brand-new payment feature that lets its Dots AI agent complete shopping and place orders on behalf of users.
The ChatGPT wallet is initially available only to OpenAI Pro subscribers in the United States who are 18 or older.
OpenAI developed the feature together with American Express (AXP), MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V); users keep their existing credit card protections and rewards.
On October 27, 2026, in Las Vegas, Nevada, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman spoke at Oracle AI World.
OpenAI released the ChatGPT wallet on Friday, a new payment feature that enables its Dots AI agent to buy goods for users. The wallet was built by OpenAI in partnership with American Express (AXP), MasterCard (MA) and Visa (V), and cardholders' existing credit card rewards and transaction protections remain unaffected. Eligible users only need to enter their card information once, after which they can instruct the Dots agent to search for products, with every transaction requiring the user to confirm through a security verification.
OpenAI said the Dots agent cannot directly read a user's full card number. The payment network issues a payment token to the agent, and the token contains a restricted card number, security code and expiration date specific to that transaction. Chaya Nayak, OpenAI's head of commercialization and payment products, said in an interview: "At this stage we are focused on connecting with merchants and card network partners to build a secure, easy-to-use underlying foundation."
The ChatGPT wallet arrives as major technology companies push hard into the personal AI agent space, using agents to manage schedules, book travel and handle everyday tasks. OpenAI launched the Dots agent at its developer conference in late September, slightly later than Meta's Muse personal agent.
Transactions generated through the ChatGPT wallet are expected to become a new revenue source for OpenAI in the future, but the company said it will not take a cut of transactions in the initial phase. For now, OpenAI's goal is to build merchant partnerships and position itself as a trustworthy shopping platform, especially as many merchants are trying to connect to personal AI agents.
Over the past year OpenAI has continued to ramp up its AI e-commerce efforts, but early products drew a muted response. Last autumn it launched a "one-click checkout" feature, which was later taken offline; in March this year it revamped the shopping experience to make it easier for users to search and compare prices. Nayak said the ChatGPT wallet is an iteration built on earlier shopping-related products, with a focus on the product discovery stage. "We think this is the next step: after users find the product they want, we need to help them complete the purchase process."
Luke Gebb, executive vice president of global innovation at American Express (AXP), said the limited gray-scale rollout is intentional and is "a prudent approach to ensure the system runs stably." As of the end of the third quarter, ChatGPT had more than 1.2 billion weekly active users and nearly 100 million paying users. Gebb said that with such a large user base, OpenAI can expand the wallet feature's availability at any time. "Testing and observing within a controlled scope first, then rolling it out gradually, is a reasonable pace."
With the rise of personal AI agents, merchants are divided: some companies choose to block these agents outright. United Airlines announced on Wednesday that it will bar AI agents from accessing its system to book tickets; Amazon previously used a court injunction to stop Perplexity's AI shopping agent from placing orders on its platform.
OpenAI said on Friday that agentic commerce is still in its early stages. Alongside the wallet announcement, OpenAI released supporting tools and guidelines to help merchants adapt to this new ecosystem, such as guidance on preventing merchant websites from mistakenly blocking OpenAI agents. Nayak said: "The whole ecosystem still needs time to build out the supporting infrastructure before we can achieve a smooth, high-quality shopping experience across various websites. We are currently mainly working with card networks and merchants."
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