A minority investor in adult creator platform OnlyFans just said in an interview that it’s “probably the least-likely platform to be disrupted by AI.”
Following OnlyFans owner Leonid Radvinsky’s death in March, investment firm Architect Capital bought a minority stake (16 percent) in the company in May for $535 million, Variety reported. In an interview with The Information‘s editor-in-chief Jessica Lessin posted this week, Architect Capital founder James Sagan said that people pay OnlyFans creators for connection, not content quality. (Lessin shared that her husband, Sam Lessin, was a co-investor alongside Sagan in the OnlyFans deal.)
“People are not coming to OnlyFans for the quality of the content, which AI might be able to faithfully replicate, but in fact for human connection,” Sagan said. He invoked the loneliness epidemic and said, “This is the only place on the internet where you can authentically communicate with a human. And that’s why people pay for this content.”
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“People pay upon the dimension of authenticity.” Most creator revenue comes from messages between creators and fans, not generic pictures, he said. When Mashable has viewed earnings of OnlyFans creators, messaging is typically the highest line on the invoice. But some creators’ use of “chatters” to message fans has been well-documented online. In Dec. 2025, a federal judge dismissed a class action lawsuit about OnlyFans chatter “scams.” Subscribers filed it, claiming they’d been misled into thinking they were talking to the actual creator.
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“We will never use AI in any capacity to disrupt creators,” Sagan said, “and they’re not disruptable anyways.” He did say AI will benefit the platform only to “empower” creators, though he didn’t want to get into specifics. He did mention LLMs and how they’re useful in capturing personality, but when Lessin pushed him — isn’t that a bot? — he said that AI would be useful tools but not to disintermediate the creators or automate chats.
Creators are already way ahead of this. Mashable reported that sex workers are “cloning” themselves with AI to make sexy chatbots in 2023, and a 2024 survey found that most adult creators were already using AI in their work.
He reiterated that OnlyFans would only build tools to “empower” creators, “to help them make more money and help them scale their authentic brand.”
“In a world in which you have a lot of AI slop, in a world in which everything is AI-generated, the scarce asset is authenticity, the scarce asset is human connection, and I think that will be more and more important on a forward-looking basis,” he said.
Sagan and Lessin discussed more in the wide-ranging interview. Back in Feb., when rumors swirled that Architect Capital would buy a majority stake in OnlyFans, the firm also discussed the company going public. Sagan discussed this again now, that there’s a “world in which we could go public.” He also discussed the destigmatization of the platform, due to cultural moments like the recent TV show Margo’s Got Money Troubles.
