The news: PayPal deepened its commitment to agentic AI with two new partnerships, per press releases.

• Mastercard will integrate its Agent Pay into the PayPal wallet. This will let AI agents process payments on behalf of PayPal users. PayPal will also pilot the Mastercard Agent Pay Acceptance Framework.
• ChatGPT users will be able to check out with PayPal within the chat platform. This will also enable PayPal merchants to sell within the chatbot for consumers, increasing their discoverability on AI platforms.

Why this matters: PayPal and Mastercard’s partnership can help agentic commerce scale rapidly. PayPal has 92.5 million core users, while Mastercard’s network volume tops $12.778 trillion, per our forecasts. Working together will unlock agentic commerce for far more merchants and consumers. 

For OpenAI, this gives the platform a way to monetize the increasing numbers of users engaging with ChatGPT: Sam Altman reported 800 million users accessed the tool in October 2025, a 60% increase from March. 

Our take: PayPal’s been bullish on agentic technologies. To date, it’s struck partnerships with Perplexity, Google, and now ChatGPT for AI-led conversational commerce. A tie-up with AI-powered Rokt brought post-transaction ads to Venmo, PayPal, and Honey users.

Competitors have barely kept up. Shopify cemented a partnership with ChatGPT, and Splitit launched an Agentic Commerce Partner Program to try to build AI momentum. 

Fintechs, issuers, and payment rails cannot ignore the coming tide of agent-based payment methods. Striking early partnerships with major players allows all platforms to reorient for the future of ecommerce transactions.