Harvard Research: Only 2.9% of US Consumers Pay for Generative AI Services

Harvard Business School professor Mark Egan and colleagues have published what may be the most detailed picture yet of who actually pays for generative AI—and how long they stay. The answer: very few people, and not for long.

The headline number

As of April 2026, just 2.9% of US consumers paid for at least one major generative AI service, according to an analysis of 114 billion transactions processed by fintech firm Fiserv from early 2021 through April 2026. That works out to roughly 6 million paying individuals—about two-thirds the subscriber base of YouTube TV.

The working paper, "Competition in Generative AI: Evidence from Consumer Demand," was released in October 2026. Its authors are Egan, HBS doctoral students Dominic Russel and Claire Shi, and Georgia State University professor Vincent Yao.

What the data covers—and what it doesn't

The research tracks consumer credit- and debit-card payments to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI. It does not include enterprise contracts, which makes the revenue picture lopsided: consumer subscriptions accounted for about 60% of OpenAI's revenue at the start of 2026, but only around 20% of Anthropic's historical revenue, where enterprise clients dominate.

The cutoff is April 2026. The paper does not reflect any developments since then.

Who pays

Paying subscribers skew sharply affluent, young, and urban. They tend to earn more than $200,000 a year—more than twice the US median income. People under 55 and residents of coastal or major metropolitan areas are significantly more likely to subscribe.

Retention is weak compared to other subscriptions

After 12 months, roughly 46% of OpenAI subscribers remained, compared with 35% for xAI, 28% for Anthropic, and 24% for Google. By contrast, The New York Times retained about 53% of digital subscribers at one year; Spotify and Netflix retained roughly 67% and 66%.

The researchers note that Americans routinely pay for multiple media services (Netflix and Disney+, for example), but the "multihoming index" they built for AI shows willingness to hold multiple AI subscriptions was high initially and has been declining across all four providers.

Substitutability is rising

The share of Anthropic users who also paid for OpenAI fell from 44.3% in mid-2024 to 28.3% in April 2026. Over the same period, the share of OpenAI users also paying for Anthropic rose from 2.1% to 5.6%. The researchers interpret this as the two services becoming more interchangeable—as tools combine coding, writing, and other functions in a single product, consumers see less reason to maintain several subscriptions.

Spikes in switching coincided with major model releases: GPT-4o and o1 launches in 2024 saw the highest rates of Anthropic-only subscribers adding or switching to OpenAI (around 7.9% and 7.4%).

Pricing power looks limited

Most subscribers pay at the low end. The share paying less than $35 a month was 97% for OpenAI, 94% for Google, 88% for xAI, and 76% for Anthropic. Anthropic had a longer tail: 10% paid $35–$99, 9% paid $100–$199, and 5% paid $200 or more.

The researchers' demand model estimates that a 10% price increase would cut demand by 46%—a modeled response, not an observed reaction to an actual price change. They also estimate that consumers in the top quartile of preference for ChatGPT would pay $37 more per month than those in the bottom quartile.

The model suggests consumers currently capture a large share of the surplus: paid subscribers gain about $35 per quarter in extra value. "Absent a substantial increase in AI model quality differentiation, growing substitutability among services will constrain providers' pricing power," the authors write.

A counterfactual simulation: if Anthropic exited the market, the model predicts OpenAI prices would rise 2%, xAI 1.1%, while Google AI prices would fall 4.4%. OpenAI's market share would dip 0.7%, Google's would drop 7%, and xAI's would rise 17.1%.

Disclosures and context

Egan and Yao are unpaid members of Fiserv's Small Business Index advisory council; Yao also serves as a paid consultant to Fiserv. The paper is a working paper, not yet peer-reviewed.

The findings arrive as Anthropic prepares for a potential public offering and OpenAI works toward a possible 2027 IPO. The research offers a ground-level view of the consumer revenue base those offerings would rely on: small, concentrated, and quick to leave.