AI in April 2026: the month the billing fine print changed

By Adam · Part of our monthly AI recap series, looking back at April 2026.

April was less about flashy launches and more about the terms underneath them — pricing models and data policies that directly affect what you pay and what happens to your prompts.

Pricing moved in two directions. ChatGPT Business got a price cut to USD$20/seat annual. Meanwhile GitHub announced a move to usage-based billing — premium request units replaced by token-based credits — which means heavy users will see variable monthly bills for the first time.

A privacy step-down worth flagging. GitHub Copilot began using Free, Pro and Pro+ interaction data to train models unless the user opts out. Business and Enterprise are excluded. Individual Australian subscribers need to actively opt out to keep their code out of training.

Models and tools kept shipping. Claude Opus 4.7 became the current Opus, ChatGPT Images 2.0 launched across all tiers, Cursor 3 brought parallel coding agents, and Claude Code added Routines. Google also renamed Looker Studio back to Data Studio.

What it meant for you: check your plan's data settings and billing model, not just its features. A cheaper headline price can come with usage-based costs or training-on by default.

Full month-by-month detail lives in our AI Updates log. — Adam