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Malta has handed every citizen a free ChatGPT Plus account. Other countries will be more than interested in the results of the experiment.
Ian Borg, Malta’s deputy prime minister, flew to Silicon Valley earlier this year to sign a contract no other government had signed before. On May 16 the deal was made public. Every Maltese citizen and resident, on completion of a literacy course built by the University of Malta, will receive a year of ChatGPT Plus free of charge. Silvio Schembri, the economy minister, framed the announcement as putting Maltese citizens “at the very forefront of global change”. The Malta Digital Innovation Authority is in charge of distribution. Roughly 574,000 residents are eligible.
Clyde Caruana, Malta’s finance minister, presented the country’s 2026 budget to parliament on October 27th last year, with a 100 million euros fund earmarked for the digital switchover and AI adoption across society. The Malta partnership is where part of it has now gone. Access to the AI for All programme runs through Malta’s eID system, gates on a free university-taught course, and extends to Maltese passport-holders living abroad. ChatGPT Plus retails at 20 US dollars a month. Multiplied across the resident base, the nominal price comes to around 130 million US dollars. OpenAI’s actual cost of provision is lower; the company has not disclosed what Malta is paying.
The pitch was delivered by George Osborne, a former British chancellor who now runs OpenAI for Countries. “Intelligence is becoming a national utility,” he said in the company’s announcement, “and all governments have an important role to play in making sure their populations have both the access and the skills to make the most of AI.” The unit is busy. Estonia’s education minister Kristina Kallas announced AI Leap 2025 in February of that year, bringing ChatGPT Edu to 20,000 secondary-school students from September 1st. Greece signed up to a country-level partnership earlier this year. Malta is the first nationwide consumer rollout.
The cost of free
Schembri launched Malta’s first national AI strategy at the Delta Summit in October 2019, branding the country “the ultimate AI launchpad” and pledging six pilot projects in the public sector. Most of those stalled. The new deal is structured better. Course-gating addresses the consistent finding in productivity research that AI access without training produces patchy results. The diaspora hook (Maltese passport-holders abroad qualify too) costs little and signals confidence. A small island economy of half a million people has a competitiveness logic in arming its workforce against much larger neighbours. Completion rates on the literacy course will be a measurable output, which is more than most national digitalisation announcements offer.
Pierre-Carl Langlais, a French AI researcher and co-founder of Pleias, compared the structure to the way Amazon and Microsoft built their cloud dominance: “offering a ton of credits and then you’re locked”. A country that structures its national AI literacy programme around one vendor’s product cannot easily switch citizens to a competitor without dismantling the programme. Habits form quickly. Citizens trained on ChatGPT, paid for by the state, are more likely to keep paying for it themselves when the year is up.
Nevertheless, neither Schembri nor Osborne addressed what happens in year two. ChatGPT Plus at 240 US dollars a year, multiplied across the resident base, is a recurring bill the government has not yet said it will pay; the alternatives are that citizens cover the cost themselves (which works for some) or drop back to the free tier (which raises the question of why the state subsidised the paid one). Caruana’s October budget speech allocated the 100 million euros fund for one year. The 2027 budget, due next October, will need to address the recurring cost.
Kallas, Estonia’s education minister, hedged from the start by opening talks with both OpenAI and Anthropic when she unveiled AI Leap; Malta did not. The eID gating means usage is linked to a national identity record, and the terms under which prompts are processed, stored and used for training have not been published in full. AI literacy curricula across rich-country universities remain contested (a 2025 ACM review found “little consensus among researchers and practitioners on how to discuss and design AI literacy interventions”), so the quality of the University of Malta course matters more than the marketing around it. The first phase launched in May, with the Malta Digital Innovation Authority handling distribution.
Keir Starmer’s government set out its AI Opportunities Action Plan in January 2025, naming Britain as a country with ambitions to lead on AI adoption. A Malta-style rollout across 68 million people would carry a retail price of more than 10 billion UK pounds before any volume discount. The political economy of paying a foreign company a recurring fee on behalf of every taxpayer is harder in a country of that size than in one of half a million. The OpenAI for Countries unit is selling a template rather than a tailored solution; templates that work in city-states with universal digital identity will need adapting to populations with much larger populations. But the Maltese ChatGPT experiment is clearly one that many nations will be following closely.
Photo: Dreamstime.
Sovereign by subscription was originally published on Emerging Europe.
المصدر: Emerging Europe