Sam Altman backs 'micropayment' model for AI agents to compensate publishers
Late last month, Sam Altman sat down with Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic, for a podcast episode of Re:think, the publication’s marketing and branded content studio. One clip has been making the rounds on social media the past couple days. In a rare moment, Altman was asked point blank by a media executive what he thinks the future of publishing will look like on the web. His answer, in short: micropayments. To be clear, payments made by AI agents, not readers directly (Elon Musk and others have proposed that idea before, and there are a lot of reasons it hasn’t taken off).
In a caveat at the top of the conversation, Thompson said he would leave many of the most “controversial issues” that he wanted to ask Altman about to “journalists at The Atlantic.” But for one brief moment, Thompson did ask the OpenAI co-founder how he thought media companies can survive the decline of traditional search, and the rise of AI agents, who may browse the web on a human’s behalf. Here’s that section of the conversation:
“I can give you my best theory, and I’ll caveat this by, no one knows. This is what I hope will happen and what I’ve wanted to happen for a long time. What really makes sense in a world of agents is we try a sort of micropayment-based approach. So, if my agent wants to come read Nick Thompson’s article, Nick Thompson or The Atlantic can set a price for the agent to read it — might be different than a human reading it.
My agent can read it, pay $0.17, and give me a summary of that. If I want to go read the whole article, pay $1, or however that works. If my agent wants to calculate something for me that’s really difficult to do, it can go rent some cloud compute somewhere and pay for that, but I think there will be need to be a new economic model for these agents doing lots of small transactions and exchanges of value with each other on behalf of their human controllers or whatever, all of the time.”
Thompson didn’t press Altman for more detail, but did note that the challenge would be adding up those pennies to match the $80 that one human currently pays to subscribe to The Atlantic. After Thompson said that challenge “was my problem, not your problem,” Altman disagreed. He responded, “It’s sort of all of our problem, but yes.”
The micropayments model is not merely a hypothetical, but one already being explored by a host of Silicon Valley startups and more established Internet infrastructure companies. Tollbit collects “digital tolls” for AI bots, monetizing every access and scrape. Prorata.ai compensates publishers proportionally for how much their IP shows up in AI answers. And last summer, Cloudflare launched its pay-per-crawl marketplace to facilitate these transactions for the roughly 20% of all websites that use its services.
Altman’s answer is an indication that OpenAI may be moving toward these emerging business models for news publishers. They’re a notable departure from the lump-sum content licensing deals that have been the hallmark of the company’s business with news publishers since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
Despite the tangent on publishing, most of the conversation on Re:think revolved around OpenAI’s model development, including its use of synthetic data to train AI models, its efforts to build agentic products, and the problems with AI sycophancy. You can watch the full interview on YouTube.