Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol

Incentives, Ads, and “Enshittification”

• Core worry: once “merchants pay a small fee on completed purchases,” ChatGPT has a financial incentive to favor ACP‑enabled merchants and higher‑margin items, even though OpenAI claims Instant Checkout doesn’t influence rankings.
• Many compare this to Google Search’s trajectory: starting with “pure” relevance, then slowly biasing results toward advertisers and affiliates.
• Several call this effectively affiliate marketing; they expect sponsored placements and subtle ranking tweaks to emerge later because “leaving that money on the table” would conflict with investor expectations.
• Some see it as an inevitable monetization path—similar to how search engines and social networks evolved—others see it as the beginning of AI “enshittification.”

Trust, Safety, and Financial Risk

• Strong reluctance to let agents control money: fear of hallucinated purchases, prompt‑injection scams, bulk orders by mistake, and unclear liability for refunds or fraud.
• People question how accurately product descriptions will match what’s actually bought, and whether OpenAI or the merchant will eat errors.
• There’s skepticism from regions with weak chargeback protections or mandatory 2FA (e.g., card OTP), where this flow may barely work.

User Value vs. Gimmick

• Some already use ChatGPT as a primary product‑research tool and welcome integrated purchase, citing better search quality than Google and a successful Etsy toy purchase via ChatGPT.
• Others argue checkout is already easy (browser autofill, Amazon, shop apps) and that previous “instant checkout” attempts (Meta, Alexa) saw little real use.
• A camp believes convenience plus trust will eventually normalize “buy it in chat,” especially for repeat or low‑stakes items and potentially returns; another camp sees it as PM fantasy that overestimates how much people want frictionless spending.

Protocols, Competition, and Stripe

• ACP is viewed as OpenAI + Stripe’s answer to Google’s AP2: an “open standard” for AI‑initiated commerce.
• Some see it as textbook moat‑building via new protocols and layers; others argue it’s just a practical, strict API so non‑sentient models can transact safely.
• Stripe is praised for smart positioning as the payments layer for agentic commerce; others note that any processor or LLM could implement ACP, so lock‑in is unclear.

Market Structure and Power Shifts

• Concern that OpenAI will absorb affiliate‑style commissions that previously went to reviewers and independent sites, undermining the ecosystems whose content trained the model.
• Fear that AI‑mediated shopping will favor large, established merchants and further centralize discovery, making it harder for small sellers to differentiate.
• A minority is cautiously optimistic it might redirect some power away from Amazon by making direct‑from‑merchant purchasing easier, provided the rankings stay genuinely relevance‑driven.