Agentic commerce could be coming to an LLM conversation near you, and OpenAI customers are not happy. OpenAI has announced partnerships with major retailers like Walmart to integrate e-commerce within its platform, but it has so far not served up unrelated ads in ChatGPT conversations.
Since just after Thanksgiving, however, reports of rumors have been swirling on social media that the ChatGPT app was beginning to show ads within conversations to paying subscribers from companies including Peloton and Target.
Bleepingcomputer.com published screenshots from the ChatGPT Android app on social media platform X that refer to “ads feature” with “bazaar content”, “search ad” and “search ads carousel.”
More reports of the same experience began to emerge from ChatGPT users.
“AI startup Hyperbolic’s co-founder, Yuchen Jin, shared a screenshot where ChatGPT seemingly suggested connecting the Peloton app in an unrelated conversation,” TechCrunch reported. “Worse still, Jin noted he was a paid subscriber to ChatGPT’s $200 per month Pro Plan. At that price point, ads would not be expected.”
After nearly a week of online discussion, OpenAI executives have finally weighed in, denying they are running ads—sort of.
The company’s first online response was to deny the screenshots were actually ads.
“I’m seeing lots of confusion about ads rumors in ChatGPT,” Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, initially said in a post on X. “There are no live tests for ads—any screenshots you’ve seen are either not real or not ads. If we do pursue ads, we’ll take a thoughtful approach. People trust ChatGPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that.”
Shortly after that, OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen tweeted that the messaging was confusing and could have been perceived as promotional and more care would be taken in the future, though he stopped short of saying the company is or will run ads.
“I agree that anything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care, and we fell short,” he acknowledged. “We’ve turned off this kind of suggestion while we improve the model’s precision. We’re also looking at better controls so you can dial this down or off if you don’t find it helpful.”
All the major payments and retail juggernauts are positioning themselves to take advantage of agentic commerce. Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, and even OpenAI have made recent announcements regarding how they will be taking advantage of AI agents to sell to consumers.
Automation Today will continue to monitor how agentic AI will entwine with commerce and whether that will include OpenAI serving up ads to its users within conversations.
