Jul 10, 2026 – Technology

Haves, have-nots and know-nots: Inside AI’s new class divide

• By Zachary Basu

A staggering class divide now separates how Americans experience artificial intelligence:

• For frontier power users, AI feels like a revolution: a force capable of conjuring companies, building software and solving complex problems at warp speed.
• For the average person, it feels more like an evolution: a smarter search bar, a faster inbox, an ambient tech layer that saves time — but not much else.

Why it matters: Trillions of dollars in economic value — and the livelihoods of millions of workers — are being staked on a technology that most Americans neither trust nor fully understand.

• It’s a new chapter in America’s digital divide — the AI “haves,” “have-nots” and “know-nots” — with profound implications for the future of wealth, work and power.

Zoom in: The newest frontier models are designed for an agentic world of coding, research and cybersecurity that most Americans will never see, let alone operate.

• OpenAI’s Sol and Anthropic’s Fable now sit atop the pyramid of elite AI obsession, prized for running long coding and research loops with minimal human intervention.
• Prominent developers have spent the week personifying the two models — debating their temperaments, work ethics, even their personalities, the way sports fans argue over rival athletes.
• “My overall feel is that Fable is a ‘wise owl’ who is very thoughtful and very well spoken,” tweeted AI researcher Peter Gostev. “GPT-5.6-Sol is like a rottweiler who will grab the problem by the throat and not let go until it is done.”

Reality check: The people fluent enough to judge Sol against Fable on a coding benchmark are a tiny slice of the country. For most Americans, those names and metrics mean nothing.

• Millions of people encounter AI passively or unknowingly — through search summaries, AI-generated content, customer-service bots and invisible features inside apps.
  
• Nearly half of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, but the most common use is basic information search — the same job Google has done for two decades, a world away from autonomous coding agents.
• OpenAI counts more than 50 million paying subscribers in its weekly ChatGPT user base of more than 900 million. The population running agentic coding tools is a fraction of that fraction.

Between the lines: Even among the elites living the frontier AI revolution, there’s a pecking order.

• Sol began as a restricted preview for OpenAI’s trusted partners and select organizations before broader rollout, making early access itself a status marker inside AI circles.
• Fable was pulled offline globally for nearly three weeks in June under U.S. export controls, while its more powerful sibling, Mythos, remains restricted to a small number of trusted organizations.
• The result is a hierarchy inside the hierarchy: free users, paid users, power users, preview users and an insider class testing capabilities the rest of the world can only read about.

The big picture: The AI industry ultimately needs broad social permission for the transformation it’s selling: more data centers, deeper workplace automation, and AI embedded in schools, government and daily life.

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