A handful of American households pay for AI. Is the future free — or a subscription?

A handful of American households pay for AI. Is the future free — or a subscription? toggle caption CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP Stay up to date with our Up First newsletter, sent every weekday morning. Kirby Plessas doesn't have an AI subscription. She has two. As a self-described technophile, she uses chatbots outside of work to plan family parties, tweak cocktail recipes and once to diagnose a broken wine cooler's motherboard. All the help Plessas gets from AI justifies the $40 a month she pays for both OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. "I wouldn't doubt that within a year I'll probably have a Claude subscription as well," she said. Sponsor Message But for most people, she believes, free AI is good enough. And judging by their spending, Americans agree. Only about 3% of households were paying for AI in February, using the most recent numbers available from the Bank of America Institute, which researches consumer trends based on the bank's customer transactions. Yet while the number of personal subscribers remains small — plenty of workplaces and universities do pay for AI services — their ranks are growing fast. About 10% more households paid up in February compared to a year earlier, according to the institute. "If you think back to Netflix and streaming services, at the beginning the growth was quite slow," said Sekoul Krastev, cofounder of the Decision Lab, a research firm with an emphasis on behavioral science. Krasteve said it isn't the norm to pay for AI — yet. "Once that status quo is created, subscriptions will definitely start to go up sharply just the way we saw with streaming services," he said. Plessas puts it this way: "There's a thought out there that we're all going to get addicted to using AI. So when the free ones go away, everyone will have to pay." Subscriptions get you more Even if they worry about how it will affect their daily lives, most Americans use AI. In fact, 51% of Americans said they use AI to research what they're curious about, according to a Quinnipiac poll released in March. Sponsor Message They're just using free versions. Most AI platforms offer them — to a point. For example, OpenAI lets users send its default model 10 messages every five hours before booting them to a weaker version. "You would get a little notification that says 'Your time has run out,'" said Pam Dean, who now subscribes to both ChatGPT and Claude. "You're stuck in the middle of something and then you couldn't continue." The main selling point for subscribers is that they get to ask smarter models more questions, more often. A $20 monthly ChatGPT Plus subscription lets users send up to 1,280 messages a day before a downgrade. Subscribers also get more advanced features, such as being able to create tailored versions of ChatGPT to fit their specific needs. To prepare for a possible move from Los Angeles to Mexico, Jim Arnold created "Francisco," a ChatGPT version that acts as his Spanish tutor. Francisco corrects Arnold's Spanish and has conversations with him through his computer speakers. Arnold fine-tuned Francisco to speak slower, and to take longer pauses before replying. That gives Arnold a chance to think of the right Spanish word before Francisco interrupts. Still, Arnold never tried the free version of ChatGPT, and was wondering if paying was worthwhile. So he asked the AI. "And of course, you know, ChatGPT's answer was that I should keep what I'm doing for sure," Arnold said. Today's version of ChatGPT will remain free … OpenAI has about 50 million subscribers. Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, believes there's room to quadruple the number of users who pay. Still, Turley said, subscribers will always be a minority of the people who use ChatGPT. He said the company's mission is to keep this tech accessible to benefit everyone: "And one of the ways that we do that is by making sure people can access it for free." Sponsor Message The birth of ChatGPT subscriptions wasn't about revenue, but keeping the site usable, Turley said. AI takes expensive computing power, and in the early days after ChatGPT's launch, putting up a subscription paywall helped the company keep up with demand while still allowing deeper access to those willing to pay up. "We weren't even trying to make money," Turley said about the launch of the subscriptions. But, he added, "It's been a really nice side effect that that also generates revenue and builds an amazing business." …but you might have to pay for the next version Turley believes OpenAI will likely always offer a free version of ChatGPT. But he is not promising a free version of its eventual successor. That will likely be an agentic AI, a type of AI that can act on its own to do tasks for the user or an organization. Think of an AI agent that can plan a vacation for you, or do your shopping. OpenAI already offers agentic services, but Turley envisions a version that acts like a personal assistant, thinking of ways to improve your life while you're away from