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Start free trial →WSJ Tech News Briefing · October 2026
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.
…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,
…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?
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.
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…
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…
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?