Why the $200 price tag, though? White declined to discuss specifics about the economics of Claude Max’s pricing and whether Anthropic is losing money on the plan. He brought the conversation back to the value provided by Anthropic to power users and how the abilities of AI tools are improving. “It’s a very dynamic environment,” says White. “We are going to be adaptable. The market is going to be adaptable.”

Leaders at Google are also keeping an eye on the competition when it comes to pricing the company’s most expensive AI subscription. “We look at what makes sense in terms of the market landscape,” says Shimrit Ben-Yair, a vice president of Google One and Google Photos. She lists the cost to provide the included features and the perceived value to consumers as two additional factors contributing to why Google picked $250 a month for its AI Ultra plan. Google did not respond to follow-up messages asking whether the company is losing money by providing this to power users.

OpenAI and Cursor declined to comment for this story.

Market Forces

As a non-builder normie, paying that much for any AI tool is impossible to justify as part of my budget. I canceled my ChatGPT Pro subscription almost immediately after I finished testing the new agent feature for work. When the recurring $18 charge for Netflix is on the bubble, allocating $200 every month to an AI tool feels laughable. In this economy? Be real. But, leaders at AI companies are hopeful that those top-shelf plans, which are pleasing power users now, will attract more mainstream subscribers in the future.

Ben-Yair considers Google’s $20-a-month plan for basic Gemini access as already having reached mainstream adoption from consumers, with the $250-a-month tier potentially following soon behind. “It’s true that while it skews a bit more professional today,” Ben-Yair says, “my personal passion is the consumer space and what it can unlock.” Anthropic’s White hopes to cultivate additional power users for Claude by making the tool simpler to use and providing more user guidance inside the chatbot.

Even if the companies were able to convert more everyday people into power users who are willing to pay multiple hundreds a month for AI access—a tough sell for the millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck—it remains unclear how long OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others can even can afford to offer this high-level access to generative AI tools.

One thing that is almost for certain, though, is that the cost of these plans won’t stay stagnant in the coming years. They will just get more expensive. “We have not hit the ceiling on the cost of these systems, particularly in the enterprise space,” says Miller. When the market price is set by vibes, truly anything is possible.