Dating coach Matthew Hussey launched "Matthew AI" in late 2024. According to Delphi, the startup behind it, the bot has already had over one million conversations and nearly 2 million minutes of voice chat. He charges $39/month for the privilege of talking to a chatbot trained on his books and talks.
Hussey isn't alone. Tony Robbins sells access to his AI clone for $99/month. Spiritual teacher Gabby Bernstein charges $199/year for hers. David Ghiyam offers a sliding scale starting at $1/month, which certainly beats his $15,000/hour private coaching rate.
The company making this happen
Delphi is the platform powering most of these AI coaches. Founded in late 2022, right before ChatGPT launched, the San Francisco startup raised $16 million in Series A funding in mid-2025. The round was led by Sequoia, with Anthropic's Anthology Fund and Menlo Ventures also participating.
The pitch is simple: upload your books, podcasts, talks, and interviews, and Delphi creates a chatbot that supposedly thinks like you. Users can interact via text, voice calls, or video chat, even in languages the original creator doesn't speak.
The roster of people using Delphi is surprisingly broad. According to a Sequoia blog post, it includes coaches like Matthew Hussey, doctors like Mark Hyman, and professors like HubSpot founder Jeff Bussgang offering 24/7 access to their courses. Also Arnold Schwarzenegger, apparently.
The business case (if you're a guru)
The economics are obvious. A chatbot scales infinitely. A human doesn't.
Hussey put it bluntly to the Wall Street Journal: he "literally can't do" what the bot is doing, which is giving people access to his "mind" around the clock. Bernstein framed it as authenticity protection. If she doesn't make an official AI version of herself, someone else will make an unofficial one that's "not in alignment with my truth."
Which, okay. That's one way to phrase "if I don't monetize this, someone else will."
Delphi claims Matthew Hussey's digital mind is generating seven figures in revenue. I couldn't verify that number independently. But at $39/month with over a million conversations, the math at least makes sense directionally.
And then there's the piracy problem
Robbins found out the hard way that if you sell an AI version of yourself, someone will try to undercut you. A site called YesChat was running at least eleven unauthorized chatbots branded with Robbins' name, including "Talk to Tony Robbins" and "Tony Robbins GPT." The site charged subscription fees ranging from $8 to $40/month for access to over 200,000 celebrity-mimicking bots. Larry David, Stephen King, Roger Ebert. It's unlikely any of them had anything to do with it.
Robbins sued in June 2025, claiming trademark violations, false advertising, and violations of California's right of publicity law. The suit sought at least $10 million in damages. His attorney, Brian Wolf, said he wasn't aware of any other case where a celebrity had sued over a GPT chatbot replica.
A note on the outcome: The original source for this story claimed Robbins won and YesChat paid $1 million and shut down. I couldn't verify this. The most recent coverage I found, from late 2025, shows the case was still pending and YesChat hadn't responded to the lawsuit. This may have resolved since then, but I can't confirm the settlement details.
What you're actually buying
Here's the part that gets murky. These aren't really the coaches. They're chatbots trained on the coaches' public content. The difference matters.
When Bernstein says her AI is backed by "20 years of books, lectures, workshops and meditations," she's describing training data, not expertise. She doesn't actually control it. She's turned it over to Delphi. The startup handles the AI infrastructure. The coach provides the content library and the name recognition.
Is that worth $99/month? Depends what you're comparing it to. Robbins' seminars can cost several thousand dollars. His AI costs less than a Netflix subscription plus a gym membership. For someone who finds value in that content but can't afford the live version, the calculus might work.
But it's also just a chatbot. A pretty good one, by some accounts. Six-hour conversations aren't unusual for Hussey's AI, according to Delphi's CEO. Whether those six hours provide anything resembling the value of actual coaching is a different question, and not one I can answer.
Where this is going
Delphi's ambitions extend beyond self-help. The company talks about "digital immortality," parents preserving their knowledge for children, legacy preservation for historical figures. About 70% of their customers are knowledge-based professionals. The other 30% are business owners looking to scale themselves for customers or employees.
The legal landscape is still forming. Denmark is proposing that individuals hold copyright over their personal likeness. The EU AI Act now requires labeling of AI-generated deepfakes. The Robbins case, if it sets precedent, could determine whether AI developers need explicit permission before training bots modeled on real people.
For now, the model is working for those who control it. Coaches get recurring revenue from content they've already created. Users get 24/7 access to something that sounds like their favorite guru. And Delphi takes a cut of everything.
The uncomfortable question nobody's answering directly: if the chatbot is good enough that users can't tell the difference, and the coach isn't actually involved in any individual conversation, what exactly is being sold? Probably the same thing that was always being sold at those seminars. The feeling of access to someone who has it figured out.
The AI just scales it infinitely.
