ChatGPT weekly active users are about to exceed 1 billion, more than half a year later than originally expected

According to information disclosed internally by OpenAI, the weekly active users of the company’s chatbot ChatGPT are about to exceed the 1 billion mark, a milestone the company originally expected to reach at the end of last year. Although this goal was achieved seven months later than initially expected, ChatGPT has gained such a large number of users in less than four years since its launch. Even if it is not the fastest, it is still one of the fastest growing Internet applications.

ChatGPT's growth has been partially tempered by the rise of Google's Gemini artificial intelligence, which is becoming increasingly integrated with Google's search engine, which has billions of users. Weekly active user growth also slowed last fall when OpenAI released the GPT-5 model, which encountered setbacks in development and caused user dissatisfaction. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has since captured some of the chatbot market share, according to research estimates.

In response to these challenges, and in view of Anthropic's success in selling AI products to enterprises, OpenAI has increased its efforts to develop models and AI products for enterprise customers. In January this year, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Fryer said that enterprise customers contributed 40% of the company’s revenue and expected this proportion to increase to 50% by the end of the year.

Google reported last week that its Gemini app had 950 million monthly active users, but the number of weekly active users is likely to be far lower than that. (A court filing from a year ago showed that only 10% of Gemini’s monthly active users were daily active users. Google has not disclosed weekly active user data.)

However, Google Search now provides a large number of chatbot-like response content in both default mode and "artificial intelligence mode", and this usage is not included in the statistics of the Gemini application.

Even so, ChatGPT may have an advantage in other ways. More than 50 million people pay to use ChatGPT, and Google has yet to announce the number of paid Gemini subscribers for the average consumer.

ChatGPT is gradually developing into a so-called AI agent that can handle various tasks for users in the background: relying on the linkage function with Gmail, Google Calendar and other commonly used applications to complete operations such as scheduling, sending emails and event invitations. Earlier this month, OpenAI launched a desktop “super application” that integrates ChatGPT with its agent products with stronger autonomous execution capabilities, including the code agent Codex and the knowledge office agent ChatGPT Work.

As we enter 2026, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reminded employees that the company may face "tough times" given Google's progress in model development. However, various public model evaluations show that since then, Google’s progress in developing AI code capabilities has lagged behind OpenAI and Anthropic.

Since then, Anthropic has gradually become a more fearful competitor for OpenAI. Relying on its enterprise-oriented AI sales business, the Claude developer has surpassed OpenAI in terms of revenue; its top models have strong cybersecurity capabilities and have therefore attracted the attention of the US government. OpenAI's models also have good network security capabilities, as evidenced by the recent success of OpenAI's self-developed AI agent into our company's system and model library platform Hugging Face.