Tesla light show on December 29, 2025, in Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China (VCG/Getty Images)

Tesla stops selling self-driving technology as a one-off, pivoting to a subscription model amid slowing vehicle sales

Starting Valentine’s Day, Full Self-Driving will be subscription only.

1/14/26 7:04AM

“Tesla will stop selling FSD after Feb 14,” CEO Elon Musk announced in the wee hours of Wednesday morning. “FSD will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter.”

The stock initially jumped on the news before sliding lower in early trading on Wednesday. The mixed reaction mirrors the announcement itself, which can be read in at least two very different ways, depending on how generous you want to be to Tesla and its Full Self-Driving technology.

The generous take: As FSD nears the ability for Teslas to actually drive themselves without human intervention, its value is going to skyrocket. Tesla will be able to charge much more per month as part of a handsome, high-margin recurring revenue stream, so it will no longer make sense for Tesla to sell one-off lifetime packages.

“The FSD price will continue to rise as the software gets closer to full self-driving capability with regulatory approval,” Musk said in 2020. At “that point, the value of FSD is probably somewhere in excess of $100,000.”

At current rates, Tesla owners can buy FSD for around $8,000 or pay $99 per month — quite a steal by Musk’s estimation.

Of course, from most accounts Tesla’s tech is not actually at the level of full self-driving. Take, for example, Tesla Robotaxis, which run a more advanced version of consumer FSD, but have missed the company’s own deadline to remove safety drivers from the front seats. In Austin, the fleet of roughly 30 Robotaxis has been involved in eight crashes since June, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The less generous take: Very few people were ever willing to shell out for FSD, and those who did were often left frustrated as Tesla repeatedly pushed the promise of true autonomous driving further into the future. That frustration is especially acute for owners of older Teslas, which may require hardware upgrades to run the latest versions of FSD.

So far only 12% of existing drivers pay for FSD — either through the one-off purchase or a subscription — the company reported in October. And Tesla already slashed the purchase price to $8,000 from $12,000 back in 2024, and halved the monthly subscription rate to $99 from $199. Note that in the 2020 quote, Musk is essentially admitting that Full Self-Driving doesn’t mean “full self-driving.”

In the past few years, Tesla’s revenue growth has largely come from energy generation and services, which includes FSD. In the third quarter of 2024, services revenue rose 25%, while automotive sales grew just 8% — and that was during a record delivery and revenue quarter. With fourth-quarter deliveries disappointing, those automotive numbers are likely to look even worse when Tesla reports earnings later this month, making predictable, high-margin subscription revenue all the more attractive.

Chris Stokel-Walker

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5