Visa and OpenAI team up for AI payments

Visa has partnered with OpenAI to enable AI agents to make payments on behalf of users, integrating Visa's payment tools directly into ChatGPT products. The deal, announced at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, allows AI-initiated transactions within user-set limits including spending caps, merchant categories and required approvals, with Visa handling tokenization, fraud monitoring and chargebacks. The partnership falls under Visa's Intelligent Commerce initiative and includes potential enterprise uses, such as OpenAI's Codex agent autonomously purchasing developer services. No launch date was provided. The move follows OpenAI's failed Instant Checkout feature launched in 2024, and signals growing industry conviction that agentic commerce represents the next major frontier in online retail.