According to 1M AI News monitoring, OpenAI has abandoned its Instant Checkout feature, which was intended to allow users to complete product purchases directly within ChatGPT conversations. This decision has left several partners who had invested engineering resources in the initiative in an awkward position. PayPal had planned to integrate its wallet into the ChatGPT checkout process later this year. In exchange, PayPal committed to increasing its procurement of OpenAI's API, enterprise ChatGPT subscriptions, and the Codex programming tool, covering over 24,000 employees. With the shopping feature shelved, PayPal's customer procurement commitments remain in place, but its expected revenue from transaction fees is now uncertain. Both parties are currently re-evaluating their partnership approach. Etsy had previously begun integrating its merchants' products into ChatGPT and had proactively absorbed the transaction fees charged by OpenAI instead of passing them on to merchants. Etsy now plans to develop its own ChatGPT application, but the form of this application and whether OpenAI will charge for in-app sales remain unclear. Stripe has been less affected, as it already handles payments for OpenAI's consumer subscriptions and will continue to advance the Agentic Commerce Protocol (a standardized transaction protocol for AI agents) jointly developed by both companies. OpenAI stated that it will retain checkout functionality in a more limited capacity, shifting to in-app purchases within exclusive retailer applications integrated with ChatGPT, though the timeline for this is unknown. The Information reported that shopping is just one of several 'side quests' OpenAI is scaling back. The video generation tool Sora is also being scaled down, with plans to merge it into the main ChatGPT application, casting uncertainty on the long-term prospects of a standalone app. A character licensing agreement signed with Disney in December last year for Sora (which also included Disney's commitment to invest $1 billion in OpenAI and become a 'key customer') may be affected by this development.