TLDR
- Visa and OpenAI announced a partnership for secure agentic commerce payments.
- Visa will provide tokenization, authorization and fraud monitoring tools.
- OpenAI confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC for a possible IPO.
- OpenAI was last valued at about $852 billion after a March funding round.
- OpenAI is reportedly considering price cuts amid competition with Anthropic.
OpenAI has entered a strategic collaboration with Visa to support secure payments inside agentic commerce experiences, adding a payments infrastructure partnership as the company prepares for a potential public listing and faces rising competition from Anthropic.
The companies announced the partnership at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco. Visa said it will provide its global payment network, credentialing capabilities, tokenization tools, authorization systems and security infrastructure to support transactions initiated by AI agents across OpenAI experiences.
The development comes shortly after OpenAI confidentially filed a draft S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a possible initial public offering. The company has not set a trading timeline and has said it may remain private longer if management decides some business steps are easier outside public markets.
What does the Visa and OpenAI partnership mean for AI payments?
The Visa and OpenAI partnership is designed to let AI agents initiate secure payments with user permission and defined controls. The collaboration will allow developers and merchants to accept Visa payments inside OpenAI-powered commerce experiences while using Visa’s security and risk systems.
Transactions will operate under clear user rules, such as spending limits, merchant category restrictions or approval requirements. Visa said payments will use tokenized credentials, real-time authorization and fraud monitoring to help protect consumers and businesses.
Visa Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell said AI agents are expected to become active participants in commerce. OpenAI’s head of partnerships for commerce, Marco Mahrus, said the partnership is aimed at supporting secure, transparent and user-controlled agentic transactions.
The agreement is part of Visa Intelligent Commerce, a broader initiative focused on extending secure payment capabilities into new digital environments. Visa and OpenAI will also explore enterprise applications, including developer-focused workflows powered by Codex and more automated business processes.
Why is OpenAI considering price cuts while preparing for an IPO?
OpenAI is reportedly considering lower prices for paid access to its AI models as competition with Anthropic intensifies. The company is said to be weighing cuts to token pricing, the unit used by AI companies to bill for model usage, as it expects Anthropic to consider similar moves.
OpenAI currently offers paid consumer tiers at $8, $20 and $100 or more per month for access to GPT-5.5 models. Anthropic charges $17 per month with an annual subscription for Claude Pro and $100 or more per month for Claude Max.
Lower prices could help OpenAI retain users, attract developers and defend market share as AI model access becomes more competitive. The pricing review comes as both OpenAI and Anthropic move toward public markets, with each company having confidentially filed IPO paperwork.
OpenAI was last valued at about $852 billion after a March funding round. Anthropic closed a Series H funding round on May 28 at a $965 billion valuation, placing it slightly ahead of OpenAI on that measure.
How does the OpenAI IPO filing fit into its growth strategy?
OpenAI’s confidential IPO filing gives the company flexibility to go public while continuing to scale its infrastructure and enterprise business. The filing does not commit OpenAI to a listing date, but it allows the SEC review process to begin privately.
OpenAI generates about $30 billion in annualized revenue, according to the figures provided, but faces large infrastructure costs tied to training and running advanced AI models. The company is expected to continue spending heavily on computing capacity, data centers, chips, and enterprise products.
ChatGPT has become one of the largest consumer AI products, reaching 1 billion monthly app users in May, about three years after its November 2022 launch. That milestone came faster than Google Maps, which took about five years to reach the same level.
