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OpenAI teams up with Visa to enable secure payments through AI agents

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:23:16 +0000

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Imagine telling ChatGPT to reorder your paper towels or find the best wireless headphones in your budget, and it just handles the purchase without you lifting a finger. That is exactly what OpenAI and Visa are now building toward.

The two companies announced a strategic partnership at the Visa Payments Forum, with plans to bring Visa’s global payment infrastructure directly into OpenAI’s AI agent experiences, including ChatGPT and the Atlas browser.

How will ChatGPT’s payment system work?

The partnership is part of Visa’s broader Intelligent Commerce initiative, which is designed to extend secure payment capabilities into new digital spaces. When an AI agent purchases on your behalf, Visa handles the actual transaction using tokenized card credentials, real-time authorization, and fraud monitoring.

Tokenization means your actual card details are never exposed during a purchase, similar to how Apple Pay keeps your card information private. You also get to set your own rules for things like spending limits, which types of merchants the agent can buy from, and whether certain purchases need your approval first. So you stay in control without having to babysit every transaction.

OpenAI’s second shot at commerce

This isn’t OpenAI’s first attempt to turn ChatGPT into a checkout tool. An earlier feature called Instant Checkout, which carried a 4% merchant fee, failed to gain traction with retailers and was retired in March.

This time around, OpenAI is handing the difficult parts, like fraud detection and dispute, over to Visa, a network that already handles over 300 billion transactions a year.

Visa’s Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Jack Forestell, says the jump from recommending a product to actually buying it needs a completely different level of trust. That said, there is still no launch date, pricing, or even a user interface to show yet.

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South American Dota 2 teams were done dirty at The International 2026

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:52:18 +0000

Image Credit: Shaun Lee for BLAST

Valve has revealed the direct invitations and slot allocations for The International 2026, and there are already multiple talking points surrounding the huge announcement. For the first time in recent memory, they’ve only invited seven teams instead of eight, but the biggest controversy lies in South America being handed just a single slot in the 16-team tournament.

It’s safe to say the region, along with its players, coaches, and fans, are not very happy.

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South America Was Given Just One TI Slot

For those living under a rock, Valve recently revealed the seven teams directly invited to The International, with six European teams and one Chinese team receiving the call.

Image Credit: Valve

The remaining nine slots go through regional qualifiers. China gets two, Europe gets four, and South America, Southeast Asia, and North America each get just one. That leaves the regional split for TI looking like this:

10 European teams
3 Chinese teams
1 team each from SA, SEA, and NA

The idea of having 10 European representatives sounds bizarre at first, but it’s difficult to argue against it when Europe has comfortably been the strongest region throughout the season. Six of those teams also earned their places through direct invitations fair and square.

However, the rest of the allocation has left a large portion of the Dota community in quite an uproar, as only one team from each of SA, SEA, and NA will make it out of the regional qualifiers alive.

South America Is No Longer a One-Team Region

The biggest injustice surrounds South America receiving only a single slot. Two of the region’s representatives – LGD Gaming (formerly Heroic) and PlayTime (formerly South American Rejects) – have clearly shown throughout the season that they can hang with the big boys.

Image Credit: PGL

The former Heroic roster has been a consistent playoff contender all year long. They kicked off the season by winning FISSURE Universe: Episode 7 and went on to secure six top-eight finishes across the nine S-tier tournaments they attended.

If you ask me, that’s a pretty good success rate and strongly suggests they have consistently been hovering around the global top 10 for most of the season.

More recently, we’ve also seen the rise of PlayTime, a squad that started out as the South American Rejects. They only really started getting the ball rolling in early 2026, but they’ve been getting better with every tournament and have proven they belong at this level.

Sure, they’re a little late to the party, but they managed to claim an EWC invite in such a short time, which really says a lot – you can’t really fluke your way through the EPT Leaderboards.

I feel like making us and PlayTime fight to death for a TI slot might be one of the cruelest things I have seen Valve do to this date.

Maybe I’m wrong and it’s just feelings, and most likely nothing will change, so I don’t wanna elaborate on it.

But please try to convince me…

— kaffs (@kaffurtado) May 26, 2026

China’s Third Slot Is the Real Question Mark

So, why are people complaining about the slot distribution? The main outlier here is China receiving three slots – one for the directly invited Xtreme Gaming, and two more coming through the regional qualifiers.

Sure, TI will be held in China this year, and the regional fanbase makes up a decent chunk of the Dota 2 playerbase. However, many, including myself, believe three slots is a step too far.

Community stats expert and Team Liquid Technical Director Ben “Noxville” Steenhuisen recently posted a screenshot of DatDota’s Glicko 2 ratings for the top Dota 2 teams.

Just a snapshot of the current Glicko 2 ratings from datdota and Liquipedia.

It’s clear to see that there’s no massive invite snubs (PARI/Spirit’s ratings are high given their recent success) or regional qual snubs.

But notice CN’s 3rd highest team (Yakult) is 24th overall. pic.twitter.com/A1xBm3esv3

— Ben Steenhuisen (@Noxville) May 26, 2026

From the data, it’s clear to see Xtreme Gaming sit comfortably inside the top ten, with Vici Gaming – the only other competitive Chinese team this season – trailing at around 15th place. On paper, these two teams are completely justified to play at TI – I have absolutely no issues here.

The concern comes with the third representative. China’s third-best team – Yakult Brothers – sits all the way down in 24th place. In a 16-team tournament of TI’s scale, it’s pretty difficult to justify that slot based on what we’ve seen this year.

While stats don’t tell the full story, Yakult Brothers have qualified for seven S-tier tournaments this year and finished bottom five in every single one. If this is the likeliest candidate to take that third slot, it naturally raises questions about how competitive that slot will be at the actual tournament.

Valve Had a Better Alternative

If Valve had already decided on three Chinese slots well in advance, you can’t really argue with that. However, a compromise was still on the table that could have offered a better solution.

This year, Valve merged Western and Eastern Europe into a single qualifier bracket for four slots, but South and North America remain separate.

This has effectively handed GamerLegion – a team that hasn’t made a single playoff appearance this season – an almost guaranteed path to The International, simply because they’re the only team in their region. A red carpet was laid out for them to claim that sole slot.

Image Credit: PGL

What Valve could have done instead was merge the two regions into a single “Americas” qualifier and allocate two TI slots to it. That would have made for a much more interesting bracket, with LGD Gaming, PlayTime, and GamerLegion duking it out for two slots. Whoever comes out on top would have fully earned their spots, and nobody could argue otherwise.

At the end of the day, it was always going to be impossible for TI’s slot allocation to make everyone happy. But man, do I feel for South America. Back then, Valve awarded the region two TI slots even though it had only one competitive team. Now, just as they finally have two strong squads, that opportunity has been scaled back to a single representative. That’s just incredibly unlucky timing.

It also sucks that PlayTime and LGD Gaming as organizations have both invested into these rosters, and one of them won’t even see the light of the TI stage. Considering what both squads have shown this season, it feels really unfortunate that they’re being forced into a gladiator fight for a single spot.

The post South American Dota 2 teams were done dirty at The International 2026 appeared first on Esports Insider.

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RogueDB introduces a simplified database platform designed to reduce infrastructure work for startups and IT teams

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:12:41 +0000

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In early-stage companies, time often becomes the most constrained resource. Founders and engineering teams must move quickly to build products, reach customers, and refine their offerings. Yet a significant portion of that time can be spent on infrastructure tasks that sit behind the scenes. According to a report, application development accounted for just 16% of developers’ time, meaning the majority of their work was spent on operational and supporting tasks rather than writing code. Against that backdrop, database management has become one of the areas where engineering hours quietly accumulate.

Jacob Blankenship, founder of RogueDB, believes this is where many startups lose momentum. “When teams look back at how their engineers spend time, database management can take a surprising share of it,” he explains. “Our focus has been simple. If we can give those hours back, engineers can spend them building their products instead of maintaining infrastructure.”

RogueDB is a fully managed database platform designed to handle the core responsibilities traditionally associated with data infrastructure. The system manages performance, scaling, and security within the platform itself, while allowing developers to interact with the database through a simplified API. According to Blankenship, the goal is to reduce the operational overhead that many development teams encounter as their applications grow.

The challenge, he explains, often begins with the way databases are typically deployed. Many teams either configure and maintain their own database infrastructure or adopt a managed platform that still requires ongoing tuning and configuration. Both paths can place a significant workload on engineering teams.

Blankenship notes that even experienced engineers may spend weeks or months configuring infrastructure and troubleshooting performance. “Setting up a database environment can take a considerable amount of time,” he says. “And even after the initial set-up, there are still ongoing responsibilities for maintaining the performance, security, and preparing the system for scale.”

RogueDB attempts to simplify that process by removing several traditional steps. According to Blankenship, the platform operates through a purely API-driven architecture rather than relying on conventional SQL-based interaction. From his perspective, this approach reflects a shift in how modern applications integrate data systems.

“There has been an assumption for decades that a serious database requires SQL and extensive configuration,” he says. “We designed RogueDB to show that a database can be integrated directly through an API with zero configuration and still deliver strong performance and security.”

According to Blankenship, that design in practice means developers interact with the database through programmatic calls rather than managing configuration layers themselves. He explains that the platform is structured so that security and performance are embedded into the core design. “Our philosophy is there should only be one way to use the system: the secure way,” he says.

The platform’s development has also been shaped heavily by user feedback. During the first quarter of 2026, the company focused primarily on stabilizing the product and addressing issues reported by early adopters. Blankenship says those improvements were implemented quickly, within days rather than weeks or months.

“When customers identified problems or asked for adjustments, we prioritized rapid fixes,” he says. That feedback-driven approach has influenced the product roadmap as well. The company is expanding the platform’s capabilities throughout 2026, including additional support for transactional workloads and analytical data processing. According to Blankenship, these features reflect common requests from organizations evaluating the platform.

“Our roadmap is shaped by the conversations we have with users,” he says. “When teams tell us what capabilities they need to move forward, those insights help determine what we build next.”

The company’s current audience consists primarily of startups, IT firms, and small to medium-sized businesses that prioritize speed and flexibility. These organizations often operate with small engineering teams where each hour of development time carries significant value.

Blankenship notes that database management can represent several hours of weekly work for each engineer. “Even conservative estimates suggest engineers can spend multiple hours a week managing database infrastructure,” he says. “If a platform can reduce that significantly, the benefit compounds quickly across a team.”

By reclaiming that time, he argues, teams can focus on the activities that define their growth. “The real goal is not just a faster database,” Blankenship says. “It is giving engineers the ability to concentrate on building products and launching features instead of maintaining the plumbing behind them.”

As RogueDB continues to expand its capabilities and pursue additional compliance certifications, the company’s long-term vision remains centered on that same principle. In Blankenship’s view, reducing infrastructure complexity ultimately enables smaller teams to compete more effectively.

“When you give people back their time, they can move faster and build better products,” he says. “For startups and growing businesses, that difference can shape everything from product development to how quickly they reach the market.“

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Matt Rutledge teams up with the Esports Awards to launch the Mobile Awards

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:45:52 +0000

Screenshot credit: Esports Awards

Mobile esports veteran Matt Rutledge has joined forces with the team behind the Esports Awards to launch the Mobile Awards.

The company’s first awards show, dubbed The Mobies, will take place in the summer of 2023 and will recognise the best in the mobile industry, including players, games, teams and content.

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The Mobile Awards is a joint initiative started by the team behind the Esports Awards, an esports industry awards show, and Matt Rutledge, the CEO of gaming guild BAYZ and former Director of Mobile Gaming at Complexity Gaming.

The Mobies aims to recognise players, teams, media, hardware providers, games, events, and personalities from the mobile gaming industry, with an initial focus on the mobile esports ecosystem.

The Esports Awards, which took place last week, also had two mobile categories, mobile esports game of the year and mobile esports player of the year. It is not yet confirmed whether these categories will remain following the announcement of a mobile-specific awards show.

Esports Insider has teamed up with the University of Warwick for ESI Next Gen. TO find out more, click here!

The Mobies organisers noted that users can vote for the categories they want to see awarded at the Mobile Awards website, but no more information regarding format of the show was disclosed.

Rutledge commented on the launch: “I am absolutely thrilled to be spearheading such an innovative and important project. The mobile industry is ever-growing and touches so many people worldwide. The Mobies will serve as a ground zero for lifting up talented individuals, organisations, and initiatives in the mobile industry.”

The post Matt Rutledge teams up with the Esports Awards to launch the Mobile Awards appeared first on Esports Insider.

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