ChatGPT monthly users hit 1.1 billion as growth slows

2026-06-18

1.1 billion users, but growth slows

According to US research firm Sensor Tower, monthly users of OpenAI's conversational AI ChatGPT reached 1.1 billion. However, growth has slowed, and US rivals Google and Anthropic are catching up. Its share of the overall conversational AI market stood at 46%, down 13 percentage points from a year earlier.

Gemini and Claude surge

Sensor Tower released monthly estimates of users accessing the service through smartphone apps and websites. OpenAI discloses weekly user numbers and most recently said in February that weekly users topped 900 million.

In the company's data, ChatGPT had 1.11 billion monthly users in May. That was up 20% from a year earlier, but growth has been sluggish since around autumn 2025. Google's second-ranked Gemini grew 2.3 times to 662 million users, helped by a new image-generation feature released in August 2025.

Anthropic's third-ranked Claude grew 5.5 times to 245 million users. In addition to expanding corporate use, attention rose over its dispute with the US Department of Defense, driving a sharp increase in usage since February. The subscription rate for paid services is also high.

Japan rises, emerging markets lead growth

In Japan, ChatGPT users rose 24% to 44 million. By country, growth continued in emerging markets such as India and Indonesia, while some European countries, including Germany and Italy, saw users start to decline. Outside the top three providers, US-owned Grok and Meta AI were clustered below 100 million users, while Perplexity and China's DeepSeek roughly halved from their 2025 peaks.

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