Last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that in the future, AI will become a basic service—just like electricity and water. People will use it without thinking too much; It will become a utility that consumers will buy on a metered basis, just like they buy electricity and water. Now it seems that this prediction is coming true. AI company Anthropic has changed the pricing structure for its AI model, Claude. The company has now started charging enterprise users on a per-seat usage basis. Apart from this, the company has also ended the earlier discount on API access.
Anthropic will now take money based on usage
The company’s new enterprise plans are more affordable than its previous fixed-subscription model. This means that while the company has reduced the starting price of its plans, it will now charge users based on their actual usage. Previously, the company charged between $40 and $200 per month for individual technical and business seats; But now, the price of many of these seats has been reduced to $20. As a result, users will now have to pay based on their monthly usage. Apart from this, the earlier discount of 10–15% on using API has also been removed.
What effect will this have on users?
Due to this decision of Anthropic, now users will have to pay for AI services according to their actual usage. Under the company’s new plan, users get access to the platform itself by paying a “seat fee.” In addition to this access, users will be charged based on the number of “tokens” used—this payment must be made in advance. In other words, users have to pay this money *before* they can use the AI service.
AI companies are now focusing on earnings
For some time now, AI companies have been investing heavily in the development of AI technology. These companies’ spending—especially on infrastructure like data centers—has skyrocketed; But, his business operation has not generated any significant income yet. As a result, these companies are now focusing on making money. To do this, they are adopting a variety of strategies, such as serving ads with answers from AI.
Will AI become a basic service?
Following Anthropic’s move, Altman’s predictions appear to be coming true—specifically his statement that AI will evolve into a basic utility service that people pay for based on their usage, just like electricity. He said that in the future, instead of paying a fixed price for AI services, people will pay for the specific amount of computing power they need.