According to internal disclosures from OpenAI, the company's chatbot ChatGPT is approaching the milestone of 1 billion weekly active users. OpenAI had originally planned to achieve this goal by the end of last year.
Although reaching this milestone is seven months later than the company's initial projections, ChatGPT is set to achieve such a user scale in less than four years since its launch. Even if not the fastest-growing internet application, it ranks among the top tier.
A company spokesperson declined to comment.
The growth of ChatGPT's user base has encountered obstacles, partly due to the rise of Alphabet's Gemini artificial intelligence. Gemini is increasingly integrating with Alphabet's web search engine, which has billions of users. OpenAI's weekly active user growth also slowed after the release of GPT-5 last autumn. The development process of this model has been fraught with setbacks and has received negative user feedback. Multiple research institutions estimate that since then, Anthropic's Claude chatbot has also captured a portion of the chatbot market share.
Facing these competitive challenges, and given Anthropic's strong performance in selling AI products to enterprises, OpenAI has stepped up its research and development of models and AI products for enterprise clients. In January, OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Friar, stated that enterprise clients contributed 40% of the company's revenue, and she expects this share to rise to 50% by the end of this year.
Alphabet disclosed last week that its Gemini application has 950 million monthly active users, but the weekly active user base is likely only a fraction of that.
However, Google Search now provides a large number of chatbot-like query results in both default mode and "AI mode," and this usage is not included in the Gemini app's statistics.
Nevertheless, ChatGPT still holds advantages in other areas. Currently, over 50 million people pay for ChatGPT, while Alphabet has not yet disclosed the number of paid subscriptions for Gemini aimed at general consumers.
ChatGPT is gradually evolving into what is known as an AI agent, capable of handling various tasks for users in the background, such as scheduling, sending emails, and making invitations. It can achieve this by connecting to Gmail, Google Calendar, and other commonly used applications. Earlier this month, OpenAI launched a desktop "super app" that integrates ChatGPT with the company's more autonomous agent products, including the code agent Codex and the knowledge work agent ChatGPT Work.
OpenAI previously forecast that ChatGPT would generate $25 billion in revenue this year, relying on subscription services, advertising, and "research collaboration projects," up from approximately $10 billion in chatbot-related revenue last year.
As 2026 approaches, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned employees that the company would face a "difficult situation" due to Alphabet's progress in model development. However, various public model evaluations show that since then, Alphabet's development progress in strengthening AI code capabilities has lagged behind OpenAI and Anthropic.
Since then, Anthropic has become an increasingly tough competitor for OpenAI. This Claude developer has achieved revenue surpassing through selling AI services to enterprises. At the same time, the strong cybersecurity capabilities of its top-tier models have also caught the attention of the U.S. government. OpenAI's models also possess considerable offensive and defensive network capabilities, as evidenced by the recent successful breach of OpenAI's own systems and the Hugging Face model repository platform by OpenAI's self-developed AI agent.
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