The AI race is unforgivingly fast and brutal. Industries have already adopted it, and the biggest AI companies are racing to put it in the hands of students through exclusive deals and discounts. Now, it seems the next avenue is giving universal access to all citizens, starting with ChatGPT Plus.
What’s the deal?
Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology in the UK, has reportedly held discussions with OpenAI that involve giving ChatGPT Plus access to all UK residents. This would be one of the first deals of its kind for OpenAI, after unverified reports claimed that the UAE was also giving free ChatGPT Plus access to all citizens earlier this year.
ChatGPT Plus is a $20/month paid tier that offers a handful of perks, such as priority access to users, higher limits for using the latest AI models, expanded voice chat, image generation, file analysis, Deep research, and the ability to create custom bots called GPTs. The free version is available to all internet users, even without creating an account.
“Those close to the discussion say Kyle never really took the idea seriously, not least because it could have cost as much as £2bn,” reports The Guardian, citing two unnamed sources privy to the meeting that happened in San Francisco. The UK minister has reportedly held multiple meetings with OpenAI chief Sam Altman this year.
The minister recently praised ChatGPT as a “fantastically good” tool, while OpenAI has expressed interest in democratizing access to AI tools for its user base in the country. The UK government has already inked deals with OpenAI that involve access to the underlying API for developing custom bots to help businesses and civil servants.
In January, the UK revealed plans for a secure digital wallet system that covers driver’s licenses and other approved identity documents in collaboration with OpenAI. A core part of this partnership was building a chatbot that would be rolled out across the GOV.UK web portal and mobile app.
What’s the big outlook?
Giving access to advanced tools is a proven way of winning converts. And since the UK is already one of the biggest markets for ChatGPT, it would make sense to offer ChatGPT Plus access to all citizens, even for a limited time. This won’t be the first initiative of its kind for OpenAI, or the UK.
Earlier this year, OpenAI launched a similar program that offers free ChatGPT access to students in the US and Canada for a period of two months. In August, the company launched ChatGPT Go, a new subscription tier for users in India that costs roughly $4.57 per month and offers some of the core ChatGPT Plus benefits.
But OpenAI won’t be the only major AI player to try such tactics, and neither is it the most aggressive at it. Google already offers Gemini Pro ($20/month) for free to students in the US, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, India, and Brazil. Additionally, it bundles the Gemini subscription with the purchase of its smartphones, such as the Pixel 10 series.
Furthermore, access to Google’s premium AI tools is also available as a perk to users paying for the Google One AI plan, which also gives access to 2TB of cloud storage. It appears that courting the interest of governments and offering AI at subsidized rates is the next frontier for expansion.
In India, a parliamentarian urged the government to dole out free access to advanced AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. The UAE government recently open-sourced its Falcon AI to use and modify freely, and Elon Musk’s xAI has also announced that its Grok 2.5 model has is now in out in the open source domain.