OpenAI allowing people to use their Codex subscription is a cunning strategy.

OpenAI wants to own the vertical dominant UX for AI.

But failing that, if everyone has to pay OpenAI to use AI in other services, at least OpenAI extracts value.

Very few businesses will be able to create enough value to cover the extremely high subsidies, so they'll have to go to the subscriptions that users already have.

An OpenAI subscription can be used not just with Codex and ChatGPT, but also many other apps.

This creates an ecosystem network effect, making the pull towards the subscription stronger.

OpenAI is just a "faceless platform" for those use cases in other apps… but users still have to pay OpenAI.

If OpenAI can reduce the cost of tokens over time for the same quality rate, they can extract a significant margin, benefitting from their economies of scale.

No matter what AI product is the hottest, ChatGPT has a cut of the revenue.

A clever, horizontal strategy that can only be tackled if you acknowledge you might not be the top winner.