Only 4.5% of US AI users pay; top 1% spend $900/month

This is the seventh edition of Andreessen Horowitz's Top 100 AI list, and the firm notes that after three years the top of the ranking looks increasingly locked in, with only eleven products making it on for the first time, the fewest newcomers ever. The new spending data, drawn from YipitData panels, is a direct attempt to close a gap a16z flagged six months ago in the sixth edition: that web traffic and app downloads say less and less about which AI products people actually use. The sixth edition focused more on geographic splits, such as the rise of Yandex Browser with its AI assistant Alice in Russia and Deepseek's role as a bridge between Western and Chinese user bases.

At the top, little has changed. ChatGPT leads the web with roughly double Gemini's traffic and six times Claude's, and on mobile the gap is even wider. The biggest shift is Claude's rise to a clear number three, a model that did not even appear on the first web list in 2023 but has since passed Deepseek and Perplexity in traffic and pulled even with Gemini among US subscribers. By midsummer, momentum shifted again: daily Claude sessions fell in July and August, while ChatGPT picked up speed again with new models and ChatGPT Work.

It also points to a gap in how deeply people engage with AI. Paid accounts offer far more features but are more complex and demand a steeper learning curve, so free users typically scratch the surface of what AI can do. That creates a growing skills gap between people who use AI at a high level and those who barely know how or do not use it at all, which could deepen existing social inequality, according to a16z. Alternatively, AI may simply keep getting easier and cheaper until it does not matter — a scenario OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describes as "unlimited brilliance" for everyone, though a16z characterizes his outlook as fairly naive.