Square lets you order food directly in ChatGPT and Claude

Running an independent restaurant often means scraping by on margins between 3% and 9%. Handing over a 30% commission to DoorDash or Uber Eats on a $40 order essentially means preparing meals at a loss.

Now, Square wants to blow that model wide open using conversational AI. The payment giant has rolled out a new ChatGPT app and Claude plugin that allows consumers to find restaurants and place orders straight from chat prompts. Even better: eligible merchants do not need to write a line of code or pay a single cent in marketplace fees.

Bypassing delivery app markups

Third-party aggregators have long gouged local food businesses. DoorDash commands between 15% and 30% in delivery commissions, Uber Eats charges 20% to 30%, and Grubhub takes between 5% and 20%—with payment processing fees tacked on top. Even customer pickup orders carry marketplace fees of up to 10%.

Square is ditching that cut entirely. Restaurants only pay standard online processing fees: 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction for Square Plus and Premium subscribers, or 3.3% plus $0.30 on basic plans.

If an order requires delivery, Square does not charge a percentage of the food bill. Instead, it taps into a white-label courier fleet that charges a flat fee, usually around $7 to $10 based on distance. Merchants can absorb that cost or pass it to diners, leaving their food margins completely intact.

The feature is currently live for U.S. food and beverage sellers with active Square Online Ordering profiles. They are opted in automatically, managing menus, stock, and pricing directly from their regular Square Dashboard.

Ordering straight from the chat box

The integration pulls live catalog data in real time, factoring in complex dish modifiers and dynamic stock availability so chatbots never pitch sold-out items.

A user can ask ChatGPT or Claude to find a nearby specialty coffee shop and order a bag of house-roasted beans. Customers can select modifications and check out entirely inside the conversation using Order by Cash App, or get routed to the restaurant's checkout page with their cart pre-loaded.

Once confirmed, the ticket pops up directly on the restaurant's existing Square POS terminal and Kitchen Display System (KDS). Operators can test the setup by invoking "@" with the Order by Cash App plugin inside ChatGPT or linking it in Claude's directory.

Square is playing a larger ecosystem game, too. Beyond OpenAI and Anthropic, it is teaming up with Amazon for Alexa+ voice commerce and co-developing Google's Universal Commerce Protocol.

Why it matters

For restaurant operators, this is practically free discovery. There are no APIs to build, no new hardware to squeeze onto the counter, and zero percent-based marketplace tolls eating into tight margins. If you already run Square Online, letting AI agents take orders is a no-brainer.

For the delivery giants, this signals an existential platform shift. Aggregators justified taking 30% cuts because they owned search and discovery. We think that as consumers hand more discovery tasks over to AI assistants, the chat interface could bypass aggregator marketplaces entirely, turning companies like DoorDash into commodity delivery fleets.

The catch? Consumer habits do not change overnight. It remains to be seen how many people actually want to order lunch through Claude today. Delivery reliability is another question mark: flat-rate white-label couriers will have to prove they can match the speed and coverage of dedicated gig networks during a Friday night rush.