Apple is considering a paid future for aspects of its Apple Intelligence service that would expand to a subscription model for additional features and more AI partners.

The introduction of Apple Intelligence has offered a wealth of AI features at no cost for owners of the top iPhone 15 models. However, as Apple Intelligence expands to more services and more partners, a subscription model for some offerings could be ahead.

A new report from Bloomberg has speculated that Apple intends to charge extra for future additional capabilities within Apple Intelligence. This expansion would follow the model — and could even be part of — the existing iCloud+ service.

In addition to a potential subscription for certain advanced Apple Intelligence capabilities, the company has already positioned itself to get a cut of subscriptions it generates for the paid levels of OpenAI's ChatGPT and other third-party AI services.

Currently, the company offers free and anonymous access to OpenAI's GPT-4o technology without setting up a ChatGPT account. The agreement with Apple also prevents OpenAI from using data from Apple users' queries to train its technology.

Apple has made the option of passing a query on to ChatGPT available in Apple Intelligence if the scope of the query is outside the built-in models' parameters. This would include requests requiring specialized knowledge, such as medical or legal databases, or larger queries that are not part of the on-device Large Language Models (LLMs).

Apple has been said to be in talks with other AI providers to potentially offer additional outside options. These partners might work with Apple to offer pro-level subscriptions to Apple Intelligence users in the future.

There is currently no timetable for the introduction of any additional paid features, assuming the report is accurate. Apple is likely to limit any subscription opportunities until a larger set of users have iPhones and other devices that can run Apple Intelligence, which would develop over the next several years.