According to internal disclosures from OpenAI, its chatbot ChatGPT is on the verge of surpassing one billion weekly active users, a milestone the company originally aimed to achieve by the end of last year.
Although reaching this target is roughly seven months later than first anticipated, ChatGPT has still amassed a user base of this massive scale in under four years since its launch. While not the absolute fastest, it remains one of the internet applications with the most rapid growth.
ChatGPT's expansion has been partially restrained by the rise of Google's Gemini AI, which is increasingly integrated into the search engine utilized by billions of users. When OpenAI released the GPT-5 model last autumn, the growth in weekly active users also decelerated. That model encountered development setbacks and sparked user dissatisfaction.
Meanwhile, according to estimates from research institutions, Anthropic's Claude chatbot has also captured a portion of the chatbot market share since then. To address these challenges, and given Anthropic's success in selling AI products to enterprises, OpenAI has intensified its development of models and AI products tailored for corporate clients.
In January, OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Friar, stated that enterprise customers contribute 40% of the company's revenue, with expectations for that share to rise to 50% by the end of the year. Alphabet (GOOGL) reported last week that its Gemini application has 950 million monthly active users, though the weekly active user count is likely significantly lower. (A court document from a year ago revealed that only 10% of Gemini's monthly active users are daily active users. Google has not disclosed weekly active user data.)
However, Google Search now provides a substantial amount of chatbot-like responses in both its default mode and "AI mode," and this usage is not included in the Gemini app's statistics. Even so, ChatGPT may hold an advantage in other areas. Over 50 million people pay for ChatGPT, while Google has not yet disclosed the scale of paying subscribers for Gemini's consumer offerings.
ChatGPT is gradually evolving into what is termed an AI agent, capable of handling various tasks for users in the background: using integrations with Gmail, Google Calendar, and other popular applications to schedule appointments, send emails, and issue event invitations. Earlier this month, OpenAI launched a desktop "super app" that integrates ChatGPT with its agents possessing stronger autonomous execution capabilities, including the code agent Codex and the knowledge and office agent ChatGPT Work.
As the year 2026 approaches, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman cautioned employees that the company might face a "difficult period" due to Google's progress in model development. However, various public model evaluations show that, since then, Google has fallen behind OpenAI and Anthropic in the development of AI coding capabilities. Since then, Anthropic has become an even more formidable competitor for OpenAI.
This Claude developer has surpassed OpenAI in revenue scale through enterprise-focused AI sales; its leading model possesses strong cybersecurity capabilities, which have also attracted the attention of the U.S. government. OpenAI's models also boast considerable cybersecurity strength, as evidenced by OpenAI's own AI agent successfully penetrating the company's internal systems and the model library platform Hugging Face recently.
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