The news: OpenAI could explore a potential acquisition of Pinterest to secure a direct source of human-generated data, particularly around product discovery and shopping intent, The Information reports.
Why it makes sense for OpenAI: The rationale is defensive as much as offensive.
- OpenAI lacks a native social or search platform, putting it at a disadvantage versus Google, Meta, and xAI, which ingest billions of real-time user signals daily. While OpenAI has pursued licensing deals with publishers and IP owners, including News Corp, Condé Nast, and Disney, those agreements are expensive and do not provide continuous behavioral data.
- Acquiring Pinterest would accelerate ChatGPT’s evolution into a shopping and discovery tool while enabling intent-driven advertising.
- Pinterest already operates a mature, search-based ad system optimized for commerce, giving OpenAI both missing infrastructure and a clearer path to competing more directly with Google, Meta, and Amazon by pairing conversational AI with native product discovery.
Why it makes sense for Pinterest: This could be a win-win deal.
- Pinterest could gain a powerful new distribution layer through integration with ChatGPT or future OpenAI agents, surfacing its content in conversational and multimodal interfaces and extending reach beyond its 600 million MAUs.
- OpenAI integration could also accelerate Pinterest’s commerce ambitions. Natural-language planning, comparison, and recommendation tools would connect discovery more directly to purchase behavior, strengthening Pinterest’s role in the consumer decision process.
- Ad monetization could also move higher in the funnel. Combining Pinterest’s intent-rich signals with OpenAI’s conversational interfaces could unlock new ad formats tied to planning and assisted shopping.
How Pinterest is doing:
- Globally, Pinterest’s ad revenues are forecast to climb from $3.06 billion in 2023 to $5.7 billion by 2027; annual growth is consistently in the mid-teens, including 16.2% in 2025 and 15.5% in 2027. Pinterest’s international presence reinforces its value as a scalable, intent-driven advertising environment with global reach.