OpenAI VP hints ChatGPT ‘unlimited’ era may be coming to an end: ‘Just doesn’t make sense…’

OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT has signalled that the company could be looking to overhaul how it structures its ChatGPT subscription. During a recent interaction, Nick Turley warned that the era of flat-rate monthly AI subscriptions may soon be coming to an end as artificial intelligence models become increasingly resource-intensive.

Speaking on the BG2 Podcast, OpenAI’s VP of Product, Nick Turley, said, “Our power users want to use more and more intelligence. And it’s possible that, in the current era, having an unlimited plan is like having an unlimited electricity plan.”

“I would be incredibly surprised if it didn’t change, given the magnitude and profoundness of the technical breakthroughs that we’ve had and the product breakthroughs that follow,” Turley added.

Sam Altman on AI being a metered connection:

The comment by Turley echoes similar sentiments shared by CEO Sam Altman, who had recently compared AI to a utility service which would eventually be metered.

“We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us um on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for,” Altman said. “One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work: ‘Too cheap to meter.’”

Notably, the ChatGPT maker is currently trying to maintain its lead in the AI chatbot space while facing direct competition from the likes of Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, both of which have at least equal or better quality models. In fact, a new report from The Wall Street Journal notes that the company has taken Anthropic’s rising popularity internally as a ‘wake-up call’ and is now working to regain the lead among developers and enterprise users.

The company currently has a three-tier subscription which starts with a ChatGPT Go plan which offers significantly extended chats with the AI but lacks many other features and also includes ads. This plan is priced at ₹399/month and is currently free in India in a bid to capture market share.

The higher-usage ChatGPT Plus plan is priced at ₹1,999/month while the Premium Pro plan costs ₹19,900/month. While there are still restrictions on many other features, the top-end Premium Pro plan gives users unlimited GPT-5.4 file uploads, unlimited image creation and maximum use for deep research and agent mode.

Turley now seems to be hinting that this era of unlimited usage may be coming to an end.