..........Americans already enjoyed roughly $97 billion in “consumer surplus” from generative AI tools in 2024 alone. Consumer surplus—the difference between the maximum a consumer is willing to pay for a good or service and its actual price—is a more direct measure of economic well-being than GDP. Generative AI’s $97 billion in consumer surplus dwarfs the roughly $7 billion in U.S. revenue recorded by OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic and Google from their generative AI offerings last year.

The larger issue is conceptual. GDP captures the value of most things bought and sold. But with few exceptions, free goods are invisible in the GDP numbers, even if they make consumers better off. When a consumer takes advantage of a free-tier chatbot or image generator, no market transaction occurs, so the benefits that users derive—saving an hour drafting a brief, automating a birthday-party invitation, tutoring a child in algebra—don’t get tallied.