How AI Agents Pay: Checkout in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode — Sam Parsons, PayPal
PayPal is integrating with OpenAI and Google agent commerce protocols to enable AI-initiated payments
“PayPal Enterprise Payments is building bridges for merchants so they can accept payments from many different places.”
PayPal Corporate Payments (formerly Braintree) is building integrations with two emerging agent commerce protocols: OpenAI's Agent Commerce Protocol (for ChatGPT) and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, which the speaker notes are nearly identical in specification. The implementation uses MCP apps — embedded UI components that work across ChatGPT, Claude, and other agents — to enable merchants to accept payments initiated directly by AI agents, with or without a human in the loop. This signals that agentic commerce infrastructure is maturing rapidly, with major payment processors now actively shipping integrations.