Few people pay for AI, but those who do spend a lot

Nearly half of US consumers use AI, but only one in four does so daily. And only 4.5 percent paid for a personal subscription to ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude in August. A year earlier, the figure was about half that.

The figures come from investment firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and are part of the seventh edition of the firm's list of the 100 most-used AI products. For the first time, it has also looked at what Americans actually spend on AI by card. The figures are based on selected panels and therefore do not show total revenue.

A few payers account for a large share of the money

The money is very unevenly distributed. The top 1 percent of spenders account for nearly a fifth of all recorded AI spending. That is more than the bottom half of payers combined.

That group spends an average of about $900 a month, and the amount is still rising. A typical paying user pays about $25 a month, and that amount has held steady for a long time.

Top spenders choose different tools than most people. They far more often use tools for building and automation, for example n8n, Manus and fal. Add to that creative tools such as Higgsfield, Figma and HeyGen. In other words, these are people who buy software to build, design and work. a16z believes this is where consumer AI has found its first real paying market.

The gap between many users and few payers also has to do with how deeply people use AI. Paid accounts have many more features, but they are also more complicated to learn. Free users therefore often use only a small part of what AI can do. That could create a growing divide between those who use AI at a high level and those who barely know it, and it could reinforce existing inequalities. The other possibility is that AI becomes so easy and cheap that the difference does not matter.

ChatGPT in front, Claude in third place

Not much has changed at the top. ChatGPT has roughly twice as much web traffic as Gemini and six times as much as Claude. On mobile, the lead is even bigger.

The biggest change is that Claude is now a clear number three. It was not on the first list in 2023 at all, but has since overtaken Deepseek and Perplexity in traffic. Among US subscribers, Claude is now on par with Gemini. Anthropic, which is behind Claude, also earns more per customer. A far larger share of Claude's users have the most expensive subscription, at $100 a month and up, than at its competitors.

In July and August, the number of daily Claude sessions fell, while ChatGPT picked up speed again with new models and ChatGPT Work.

AI agents are starting to buy things

AI agents are programs that carry out tasks for you on their own. Six months ago, they were not usable for most people. Now the startups Instinct and Tomo report hundreds of thousands of users. The big companies are responding with Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and xAI's Grok Bot.

Agents become economically important when they start buying things. According to Instinct's founder, Noah Shinn, 40 percent of users link a payment card within three weeks. After that, they spend four-figure amounts a month through the service, much of it on travel.

When more money is at stake, platforms take sides. Amazon blocked Meta's Muse within two weeks.