Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
KC Kate Clark On WSJ Tech News Briefing

“They're heavily subsidized. The two companies together have raised many tens of billions of dollars. It's very similar in some ways to the Uber and Lyft dynamic. Many small AI products are completely free right now because they're subsidized and they want to lock you in. I wonder just how expensive some of these products will become, but I think we can count on the prices going up over time.”

WSJ Tech News Briefing · October 2026

“They're heavily subsidized. The two companies together have raised many tens of billions of dollars. It's very similar in some ways to the Uber and Lyft dynamic. Many small AI products are completely free right now because they're subsidized and they want to lock you in. I wonder just how expensive some of these products will become, but I think we can count on the prices going up over time.” — Kate Clark, WSJ Tech News Briefing

Context

The host asked whether users are paying what AI services really cost, or whether prices will jump once people are hooked, as happened with cheap Uber rides. Kate says the subsidy is real and predicts prices will rise.

Transcript

WSJ Tech News Briefing Around 18:31 into the episode
Speaker 2

…a lot of compute for those users because the vast majority of ChatGPT users do not pay for it. But this is a question I think also confounds investors because they're pretty similar businesses. But, you know, at least for now, Anthropic has a much stronger financial profile than OpenAI. Well,

Bob McMillan

…of like subsidized businesses. I don't know if we're getting that right now. Just looking at the Anthropic S1 and just from what you know about OpenAI, I mean, are we paying what it costs for these services? Or are we going to just all get addicted to them and then see the prices get jacked up?

Kate Clark

Yeah, they're heavily subsidized. The two companies together have raised many, many, many tens of billions of dollars from different types of investors. This will surely change one day. And it very much is similar in some ways to the Uber and Lyft dynamic. And even more than that, I mean, if you're someone who's experimenting with smaller companies who are developing interesting new AI products, I mean, many of those are completely free right now, again, because they're subsidized and they want to lock you in. But I wonder myself sometimes just how expensive some of these products will become. But I think we can count on the prices going up over time.

Bob McMillan

Do you see? The products changing too. Like, I wonder about OpenAI and ChatGPT and just sort of, you know, there are other ways that they could be making money. We definitely saw this with Google as, you know, the google.com page was like, you know, and their search results page was like unchanged…

Kate Clark

I think so. I think they're going to change. I mean, Anthropic has indicated that they don't want to have ads, but I would predict that advertisements do become part of these broader AI business models. I would just add too that we're in this moment where Agentic and AI agents, meaning AI that can…

Bob McMillan

does OpenAI need to IPO? Like, is there pressure for them to IPO? Like, how much money do they have? How long are they going to last? You know, like, how strong is the pressure for them to sort of follow Anthropic right now?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from WSJ Tech News Briefing