ChatGPT’s long awaited move into user monetization and what it shows about the future of ChatGPT.

What Happened

  • OpenAI just launched “Buy It in ChatGPT” — an integrated shopping + checkout experience built on the new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP).
  • First partners: Shopify (soon) and Etsy (already live). Stripe is behind the payments infrastructure.
  • Business model: Merchants pay a small fee on purchases. OpenAI likely takes the bigger cut.

Why It Matters

  • Shopping & ads have long been seen as OpenAI’s path to monetization. This is their first real monetization push at consumer scale.
  • It positions ChatGPT as “The Agentic App” — not just a chatbot, but a one-stop place for tasks like shopping, travel, scheduling, email, etc.
  • Differentiator: GPT-5 “Thinking” is strong at search + discovery — helping users find niche products that are often buried in Google or Amazon.

Strategic Angle

  • OpenAI isn’t betting on one giant model for everything. They’re routing different models for different jobs (search, coding, consumer tasks).
  • Anthropic (Claude) and Google are focusing differently (coding performance, cloud services, etc.), but OpenAI has scale + distribution (~1B weekly users).
  • If shopping works, OpenAI dominates. If not, they’ll keep trying verticals until one sticks — they have both the tech and the user base.

Big Picture

  • This signals the shift from model races to application races: integrations, partnerships, and “agentic” apps will matter more than raw benchmark gains.
  • Expect expansion into travel, email, scheduling, finance, etc. Shopping is just the wedge.
  • They’re also eyeing consumer-facing apps: a TikTok-style AI video app (with Sora 2) is rumored to be next.