Agents can now pay for things — and the checkout lane is being built around trust, not speed

The wallet

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Wallet, a payment system that lets AI agents pay for goods on a user's behalf without accessing the user's actual card details. The wallet uses payment tokens as a substitute for card details, requires a security check for every purchase, and was built in partnership with American Express, Mastercard and Visa. It is initially available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the US. OpenAI says 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week, which is the audience it is offering merchants: an agent that can already talk to a billion people can now also pay. m:…0222

OpenAI is also working with fraud prevention partners including Forter, Riskified, Sardine and Signifyd, and with payment service providers including Adyen, Checkout.com and Stripe. It released a Commerce Partner Playbook to help businesses support agentic commerce, and says websites can configure CDNs or firewalls to recognize signed requests using Web Bot Auth. The message to merchants is that agent traffic should be recognized as legitimate rather than blocked, and the playbook is the instruction manual for doing it. m:…0222

The trust problem

That instruction manual exists because merchants have a real problem. Forter, named by OpenAI as a trust partner to optimize commerce performance for ChatGPT Wallet, says many merchants and risk vendors currently block agent traffic because it is difficult to distinguish legitimate shopping agents from malicious bots. Agentic orders across Forter's network have increased 6.8 times since mid-August, and 19 percent of agentic orders now connect through headless commerce protocols rather than traditional browser automation. The volume arrived before the trust layer did. m:…8735

Forter's answer is to identify ChatGPT agent traffic and feed those signals into its decisioning network, combining signals about the customer, the agent, the device and the transaction to provide approve-or-decline decisions. Forter and OpenAI are collaborating on an expanded signal set to optimize decision-making accuracy. The wallet keeps card details away from the agent; the trust layer is what tells the merchant the agent is who it claims to be. One without the other leaves merchants either exposed or blocking good orders. m:…8735 m:…0222

The customer is becoming an agent

The same shift is showing up on the customer-service side. Genesys argues that personal AI introduces a new participant: an agent that represents the customer, carries their intent and takes action on their behalf. It is working with Sierra, Meta and other industry leaders to develop the Agent Protocol, known as Poppy, a framework for communicating permissions between customers and enterprises. Genesys Cloud Navigator is expected to be generally available in the fourth quarter of its current fiscal year, from November 1, 2026 to January 31, 2027, and its Orchestrator in the first quarter of the next fiscal year. Its AI Control Plane provides the governance layer for autonomous environments. m:…5322

Hertz is already running the experiment. It is one of the first enterprises to pilot Decagon's Personal Agent Gateway, which connects the Muse agent to Hertz's reservation and customer support platform using Meta's implementation of Poppy. Renters can change or extend existing reservations through Muse, and Hertz's agent handles requests using its existing Agent Operating Procedures, covering customer verification, rental policies and live-agent handoffs. Hertz determines which requests are available through the channel, receives visibility into requests coming through it, and retains control over the workflow. Muse is the first personal agent on Hertz's channel, and businesses set policies once for the channel so new personal agents connect to the same rules. m:…0987

Google, meanwhile, is drawing a line on the other side of the same question. Gemini app users in the US can now connect Google Wallet to get responses informed by their spending habits, link bank and credit card accounts via Plaid, and ask Gemini to identify recurring charges, flag price increases or suggest a holiday budget based on last year's transactions. But Gemini cannot move, manage or invest money from connected accounts, and users can turn the connection on or off at any time. OpenAI is letting agents spend; Google is letting its agent look at spending but not touch it. The gap between those two positions is where the next argument about agent commerce will happen. m:…0151