Pay up or dumb down: OpenAI hints at $20K-a-month AI agents
Startups may need to start preparing for an AI "class divide"
The age of subsidized, broadly accessible AI models may be ending soon, replaced by an AI-driven “class system” depending on your access to capital and proximity to the frontier labs.
Yesterday, The Information reported that OpenAI may be offering AI agents that cost anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000 per month in three tiers:
Low-end agents for “high-income knowledge workers” at $2K a month
Mid-tier agents for software development at $10K a month
High-end agents with PhD-level research skills at $20K a month (my hunch: it’s basically a Deep Research agent trained on your company’s data)
OpenAI’s monetization push shouldn’t surprise anyone. I’ve argued that vertical AI agents are the best way to monetize AI—rather than API access—and have covered OpenAI’s enterprise AI strategy in depth in OpenAI’s Enterprise AI Strategy in a Nutshell, and OpenAI’s Biggest Worry Isn’t DeepSeek.
But this isn’t just about OpenAI. There’s a broader trend of AI companies moving rapidly into the application layer. 2025 marks the start of the “monetization and moat-building” phase for frontier labs, meaning they will sell enterprise software directly, powered by models that won’t be available via APIs. Recent moves confirm this shift:
Perplexity launched finance features, looking to steal traffic from sites like Yahoo Finance and Seeking Alpha by generating AI-driven financial news.
Anthropic is rumored to be building AI solutions for legal customers.
CoreWeave (AI inference) is acquiring Weights & Biases (developer tools).
Of course, many are doubting whether the frontier labs’ attempts at building enterprise software will succeed. Some say competition can easily “undercut” OpenAI, presumably with open source models. I think these takes are mostly misguided, for reasons I will explain.
Either way, these developments will reshape competitive dynamics for B2B AI startups, which are just barely starting to get traction. So what can you do about this? In the rest of this post, I will talk about:
Exactly why this aggressive monetization is happening, right now
Why expensive AI agents from OpenAI are a far better investment than “cheap” AI agents built on open source. Hint: an agent that works even 10% better is at least 10x more valuable, since these percentages can compound..
Why it won’t be just OpenAI doing this, it will be everyone. Everyone will be using “smarter models” as a way to upsell their “smarter chatbots”… Paying for smarts will become the norm soon, and it will be tough to swallow for knowledge workers.