OpenAI’s ChatGPT Nears 1 Billion Weekly Active Users Seven Months After Target
The Takeaway
- ChatGPT nears 1 billion weekly active users, seven months past target.
- OpenAI doubles down on enterprise AI amid competitor growth.
- OpenAI expects 50% of revenue from business customers this year.
OpenAI’s chatbot is on the precipice of having 1 billion weekly active users, a milestone the company was hoping to hit by the end of last year, according to information the company has shared internally.
Though the milestone comes seven months after the company originally expected to hit it, ChatGPT is still one of the fastest, if not the fastest, internet applications to reach that many users less than four years after launching.
A company spokesperson did not have a comment.
ChatGPT’s growth was stunted in part by the rise of Google’s Gemini AI, which is increasingly melding with Google’s web-search engine, which has billions of users. OpenAI also saw a slowdown in weekly active user growth last fall when it released GPT-5, a model that faced a rocky development process and backlash from users. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has also taken some share of the chatbot market since then, according to estimates from research firms.
In response to those challenges, as well as to Anthropic’s success in selling AI to businesses, OpenAI has doubled down on developing models and AI products for enterprises. In January, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said that the company generated 40% of its revenue from business customers and expected that percentage to grow to 50% by the end of the year.
Google last week said its Gemini app had 950 million monthly active users, but its weekly active user figure is likely a small fraction of that. (A year ago, a court document showed that 10% of Gemini monthly active users were also daily users. Google hasn’t disclosed weekly users.)
However, Google search now serves a lot of chatbot-like answers in its default mode as well as in its “AI mode,” which aren’t counted in the app figure.
Still, ChatGPT may have a leg up in other ways. More than 50 million people pay to use ChatGPT, whereas Google hasn’t disclosed the number of paid Gemini consumer subscriptions.
ChatGPT also is increasingly becoming a so-called AI agent that can handle tasks for users in the background, including scheduling events and sending emails or invitations through integrations with Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications consumers use. Earlier this month, OpenAI unveiled a desktop “superapp” that marries ChatGPT with the company’s more agentic products, including its coding agent Codex and knowledge work agent ChatGPT Work.
OpenAI previously projected ChatGPT would generate $25 billion in revenue this year from subscriptions, advertising and “research partnerships,” up from around $10 billion in chatbot revenue last year. (The company also projected it would burn $25 billion in cash overall this year, though its recent burn rate couldn’t be learned. OpenAI previously told investors that its adjusted operating income margin was -122% in the first quarter of the year.)
Heading into 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned employees to expect “rough vibes” based on Google’s progress in model development, though Google’s progress in developing stronger AI coding capabilities has since fallen behind OpenAI and Anthropic, according to publicly available evaluations of the models.
Since then, Anthropic has emerged as the more worrying competitor for OpenAI. The Claude-maker has surpassed OpenAI in terms of revenue on the strength of its business of selling AI to enterprises and has caught the attention of the U.S. government due to the strong cybersecurity capabilities of its most advanced models. OpenAI’s models also have strong cybersecurity capabilities, as evidenced by the way OpenAI’s AI agent recently hacked the company’s systems and the systems of model repository Hugging Face.