The Briefing: OpenAI Goes Shopping

17:04 |

The Briefing

Sep 29, 2025

The Briefing

By Martin Peers

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Greetings!

You might think the $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts would be today's biggest business event. But that's yesterday's news—word of the deal broke on Friday. (For more on that, see below). Today's biggest news, in reality, is OpenAI's launch of its shopping feature, which puts the ChatGPT creator in competition with everyone from Amazon to Instagram.

OpenAI unveiled what it calls an Instant Checkout feature, which it said was its first step "toward agentic commerce in ChatGPT." For the moment, there doesn't seem to be much that is "agentic" about this: People can search ChatGPT for information about a product and then buy it. Despite the announcement's hyperbole, the quick checkout feature is an important step for OpenAI. Given that the company seems to be trying to spend all the money in the global banking system on data centers, this promises to bring in some revenue, as merchants will pay a small fee on purchases. In particular, this service will help OpenAI find a way to get money out of the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT without paying.

How much should Amazon CEO Andy Jassy worry? Not too much—yet. What OpenAI is describing seems to be closer to Instagram than to Amazon: Once a consumer has clicked the buy button, the merchant handles everything else, from payments to shipping and returns. (Instagram doesn't offer a checkout button in its app, however.) Hilariously, ChatGPT claims to act as the "user's AI agent—securely passing information between user and merchant, just like a digital personal shopper would." ChatGPT seems to be applying the term "AI agent" to the kind of transaction that has been happening for years online.

One thing Amazon has going for it is its seamless shipping experience. Amazon's customers know that when they order something on the site, it will arrive quickly and without problems. That cannot be said for every merchant shipping on their own. Moreover, ChatGPT isn't the first company to try offering checkout—Instagram and Pinterest both attempted it, unsuccessfully.

The good news for Amazon is that it can use OpenAI's initiative as evidence to argue that the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, due to go to trial in early 2027, is out of date thanks to new artificial intelligence services (henceforth to be known as the Google defense).

EA's Exit

Shareholders in Electronic Arts can't complain about the deal announced on Monday. The $210 per share offer, valuing EA at $55 billion, appears to be the richest price put on the company since it went public 35 years ago. For the past seven years, EA stock has generally traded as high as around $140, appreciating from there only this year. (For more on the deal, watch The Information's Cory Weinberg on TITV today.)

In multiple terms, that price translates to 49.4 times EA's fiscal 2025 earnings per share. For a company that isn't growing, that's not a bad number. Incidentally, it's almost exactly the same price-earnings multiple that was implicit in Microsoft's purchase of EA rival Activision Blizzard in late 2023. Coincidence?

In Other News

• Travel management platform TravelPerk hired investment bankers for an upcoming U.S. IPO, The Information reported.

• Anthropic on Monday released its latest model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, according to a blog post. The model outperforms OpenAI's flagship GPT-5 model on a popular software engineering benchmark and is able to work for more than 30 hours straight on complex, multistep tasks, the blog post said.

• YouTube agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a 2021 lawsuit from President Donald Trump over the suspension of his account after the Jan. 6 riots, according to a court filing on Monday.

Today in The Information's TITV

Check out today's episode of TITV in which a Snowflake product management executive tells us about its plan to end the AI corporate data wars.

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