Search is now free for everyone. So is the shadow AI problem

On 16 December 2024 OpenAI made ChatGPT search available to all logged-in free users. What was a paid feature six weeks ago is now available to anyone with an email address.

This is good for your staff and it removes the last practical barrier to shadow AI. Both things are true.

Why price was the barrier

Until now, there was a natural brake on unapproved AI use: the good version cost money. Someone had to decide to spend twenty francs a month of their own, which most people did not.

That brake is gone. A capable tool that reads the live web and cites sources is now free, and it will be used for work regardless of what your policy says, because it is genuinely faster than the alternative.

The policy question is no longer whether people will use AI at work. It is whether they use it in a way you can see.

The mistake to avoid

Do not respond by blocking it. Three reasons.

It does not work — people have phones. It pushes the activity onto personal devices where you have no visibility and no record. And it signals that the company would rather have deniability than a working process, which is the wrong lesson to teach.

What to do instead, before January

• Name what may go in. Public information, your own draft text, anonymised problems: fine. Customer names, contract text, personnel matters, anything under a confidentiality clause: not without an approved tool.
• Give them something better. The most effective control is a sanctioned tool that is at least as good. People route around friction, not around rules.
• Say it once, plainly, in writing. One page. It doubles as your AI literacy evidence for 2 February, and it is the difference between a team that asks and a team that hides.

The honest framing

A colleague pasting a customer email into a free chatbot is not misconduct. It is someone trying to do their job faster with the best tool they could find.

The failure is organisational: nobody told them where the line is, and nobody gave them an approved alternative. Both are fixable in an afternoon, and both are cheaper before an incident than after one.