Could OpenAI buy Pinterest? Here’s how that would impact users and non-users alike
If OpenAI were to buy Pinterest, it would be a big shift for lots of folks.
Now, to be clear, there doesn't seem to be much smoke — at least for now — about OpenAI actually buying Pinterest. The idea surfaced in an article from The Information where staffers predicted what could happen in 2026. Reporter Ann Gehan predicted that OpenAI would buy Pinterest, which is obviously just a bit of prognostication and not a report that a deal was imminent, or even on the table.
"OpenAI would be most interested in the bones of Pinterest’s business, like its trove of image data and its existing advertising business, as well as relationships with merchants. Pinterest’s digital scrapbooking features could also complement OpenAI’s image- and video-generation tools and help it fend off competition from other AI heavyweights like Google, which launched a Pinterest-like feature in 2025."
So, what would that mean for users and, well, everyone else? For ChatGPT users, that means OpenAI would have access to Pinterest's myriad images and data, which would likely be aimed at improving its search capabilities. It would also provide a ton of well-labeled, specific data for OpenAI to train its model on, which would hopefully improve its capabilities. For OpenAI, it would be buying a cache of info that could help it compete with, say, the data available to Google's Gemini.
Wrote Tom's Guide of the potential purchase, for instance: "Google combined their search crawler with their AI creating an incredible data base — one that has arguably given Gemini the edge." To compete, Tom's Guide argued, one option for OpenAI could be to acquire a platform like Pinterest.
For Pinterest users, you could likely expect some changes — new ownership is bound to do that. But really, a potential OpenAI-owned Pinterest would mean an increasingly shopping-focused, AI-driven world. It means using ChatGPT would include built-in shopping and perusing Pinterest would include built-in AI tools.
Everything appears to be going the way of AI, so why not Pinterest?
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.