UT’s ChatGPT and Claude education subscriptions cost a combined over $4.2 million for two-year terms, according to contracts obtained via open records request.
UT announced free ChatGPT and Claude Edu services for all students and employees in June, making it one of the first universities in the nation to offer free access to both leading artificial intelligence tools, according to a UT Enterprise Technology email. The move expanded UT’s AI toolkit, which also includes Microsoft 365 CoPilot, Google Gemini and UT Sage, an instructional tool developed by UT experts.
Since June, roughly 18,000 faculty, staff and students have created accounts for both ChatGPT Edu and Claude Edu, said Mario Guerra, UT’s associate vice president of AI platforms and innovation.
UT’s two-year agreement for ChatGPT Edu costs approximately $1.1 million each year, according to the contract. The agreement began on May 6 and includes 75,000 users and 24.5 million credits. An analysis by the Texan found UT’s contract costs less per user than other institutions with public data.
The University’s agreement with Anthropic for Claude Edu is also for two years, with a commitment to spend $2 million for 70,000 users, according to the contract. It began on April 30. No other institutions have released details of their Anthropic contracts, and other local publications have not obtained contracts with other public institutions through open records requests.
UT’s negotiations with OpenAI and Anthropic began in the spring and occurred over several months, Guerra said. He said both vendors were eager to partner with UT.
“I think they were really excited to partner with a higher education institution, with the brand that the University has, the reach, the scope, the research that we’re doing,” Guerra said. “They saw us being a really good partner in that space.”
What do UT’s ChatGPT Edu and Claude Edu agreements include?
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Edu in May 2024 after seeing universities — including UT, the University of Oxford, the University of Pennsylvania, Arizona State University and Columbia University — succeed in using ChatGPT Enterprise, according to a news release introducing the service.
Approximately 30,000 people used University email addresses to create personal ChatGPT accounts prior to UT’s campus-wide agreement with OpenAI, Guerra said.
A UT ChatGPT Edu license allows students and employees “virtually unlimited everyday chat” and an hour of Live Voice — which allows users to verbally speak with the models — per rolling 24-hour day. The license also includes a monthly deep research allowance, according to UT’s AI Studio website.
ChatGPT Edu differs from the free version by providing institutional authentication and data storage. Users’ conversations are not used to train OpenAI models, an OpenAI spokesperson wrote.
A UT ChatGPT Edu license is equivalent to ChatGPT Plus, which typically costs $20 per month. It offers higher message limits, advanced tools for research and analysis, reasoning models like Codex, file integrations and document summarization, the OpenAI spokesperson wrote. Users may also create custom GPTs — tailored versions of the LLM designed for specific tasks — and share them within university workspaces, the spokesperson wrote.
UT faculty, staff and departments may request consumption-based ChatGPT Edu for heavier usage of OpenAI tools. The consumption-based model has three paid tiers: a $100 cap for 2,500 credits, a $200 cap for 5,000 credits and a $500 cap for 12,500 credits. Higher tiers are not included in UT’s contract with OpenAI, and instead are paid for by departments or colleges, Guerra said.
Anthropic launched Claude for Education, synonymous with Claude Edu, nearly a year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT Edu. The initiative aims to “equip universities to develop and implement AI-enabled approaches across teaching, learning and administration,” Anthropic wrote in its April 2025 announcement.
Claude Chat, Cowork and Claude Code are included for all UT community members using Claude Edu Campus.
UT users have a rolling five-hour message limit and a weekly usage allowance for Claude, according to the AI Studio website. The usage limits are managed by Anthropic and caps are not available to AI Studio, according to the website. Anthropic did not respond to repeated email requests for comment.
The University has a separate $73,000 year-long agreement for premium versions of Claude Edu. The premium versions are limited to faculty, staff and departments by request, though departments can purchase elevated tiers for students, according to the AI Studio website.
UT already had existing relationships with both companies. It had a similar agreement with Anthropic from September 2025 to 2026 for 100 Claude premium users. UT also signed a contract with OpenAI in May 2024 for employee licenses, Guerra said.
How do UT’s contracts compare to other universities?
UT is one of the only known universities with campus-wide access to both ChatGPT and Claude. The University determined this through conversations with both vendors and peers at other institutions, Guerra said.
Stanford University, which also provides access to both platforms, announced its ChatGPT Edu and Claude for Education contracts on June 24.
“Our original thought was that we would land at least one of those deals, and through our negotiations, through conversations, we were able to negotiate acceptable deals that we were able to find funding for,” Guerra said. “So, it really turned out better for us that we’ve now got access to both of these leading tools for campus.”
OpenAI currently has contracts with hundreds of universities, the OpenAI spokesperson wrote. However, details are largely unavailable. Most universities have not made details — such as cost and the number of users — public. OpenAI declined to provide a list.
Early adopters of ChatGPT Edu include Arizona State University, the California State University System and the University of South Carolina.
In December 2025, Bloomberg reported OpenAI sold over 700,000 ChatGPT licenses to 35 public universities. That number doesn’t include private universities, which are not subject to public records requests.
“We’re seeing growth across all regions, types of campuses, and more expansive, equitable access being provided by campuses that may have originally started with licenses for select departments or members of the campus community,” the OpenAI spokesperson wrote.
A Texan analysis of institutions with campus-wide and system-wide agreements found that UT pays significantly less than other institutions per ChatGPT Edu user. The analysis is not comprehensive, as most universities’ contracts are not public. It also does not account for differences in credits allocated for each institution.
The Texan used contract details reported by local news outlets, which were primarily obtained by open records requests.
An OpenAI spokesperson said each contract is based on the scope and needs of the campus partner.
“Our general approach is to make AI as accessible, capable, efficient, and as affordable as possible,” the OpenAI spokesperson wrote. “We partner closely with our scaled deployments across universities and work with university leaders to develop partnerships that align with the unique requirements and needs of their institution.”
Anthropic has fewer partnerships. It currently lists nine university partners on its website, with Northeastern University, the London School for Economics and Champlain College as the earliest adopters. Since June, at least four universities not listed on Anthropic’s website — UT, The University of Chicago, Stanford University and Emory University — have contracted the company for Claude for Education.
None of the other 12 universities have made their contracts or contract details public.
Guerra said UT and the UT System discussed a system-wide contract with OpenAI, though the system decided against it. The California State University, University of Maine and the University of Colorado systems all have OpenAI contracts that give free access to students across campuses. No other Texas institutions have system-wide contracts.
Other Texas universities have still invested in AI, though.
Texas State University pays OpenAI for an enterprise version of ChatGPT, limited to faculty and staff. It costs $120 per license each year, according to the university’s website. As of December 2025, Texas State had 300 ChatGPT paid users, Bloomberg reported. It also paid an approximate $1 million for Microsoft Copilot.
UT Dallas contracts Anthropic for Claude for Education, though the service is only available to faculty and staff through the Office of Information Technology. A standard seat costs $216 per user each year and a premium seat costs $600 per user each year, according to UT Dallas’ website.
Texas A&M has its own university-approved artificial intelligence program, TAMU AI Chat, according to the university’s website.
How do the contracts fit into UT’s broader AI goals?
UT’s goal is to lead the national conversation around AI deployment in higher education, Guerra said.
Responsible adoption is key to that goal, said Julie Schell, the assistant vice provost of academic technology and the director of the office of academic technology.
“You don’t want to be so AI forward that you’re completely ignoring the significant limitations of AI, and you don’t want to be so on the responsible side that you’re completely ignoring the possible benefits as well as just the importance of ensuring that students are ready for the future,” Schell said. “We very early on identified that our position was to be AI forward, AI responsible, not one and not the other, but both.”
UT began considering AI adoption in 2022, shortly after ChatGPT launched, Schell said.
The University declared 2024 as its “year of AI.” That same year, UT began developing UT Sage, a tool that allows faculty to create tutor chatbots for students. Over the following two years, UT spent over $439,000 to develop UT Sage, according to records obtained by the Texan.
In 2025, the University launched UT Spark, an “all-in-one” generative AI program. UT retired UT Spark in July after contracting OpenAI and Anthropic services to meet demands for more powerful systems, Guerra said.
Schell said UT is committed to teaching AI fluency. That includes programming for faculty and instructors, and a Computer Science & AI course requirement for students in the new proposed curriculum.
The University is encouraging experimentation, both with ChatGPT and Claude, and other systems UT offers such as Gemini and Copilot, Guerra said.
UT is also working with Amazon Web Services to develop in-house systems and is experimenting with creating its own hardware through a Dell partnership, Guerra said.
Schell said UT will send out a campus-wide AI sentiment survey to get a better understanding of how people are approaching the resource. The survey is in partnership with the California State University System, Guerra said.
“We want to hear from our community so that we can make decisions upstream, instead of making decisions without any understanding of what our community is thinking or feeling,” Schell said.
