OpenAI tops one billion active users as AI race intensifies

OpenAI announced on Friday, July 31, that it had surpassed the symbolic milestone of 1 billion active users, less than four years after the launch of its popular chatbot ChatGPT. "Our models now reach more than one billion active users and more than two million businesses. As people gain confidence in the technology, they use it more deeply," the company said in a blog post.

According to several US media outlets, the San Francisco-based startup had initially expected to reach the milestone earlier this year, after hitting 900 million weekly active users in late February, but faced increased competition from its rivals. OpenAI was founded in 2015, but did not launch its first consumer product, ChatGPT, until November 2022. By comparison, it took Facebook six years after launching its social network to reach one billion users.

The figure cited by OpenAI on Friday covers all of its artificial intelligence (AI) interfaces, primarily ChatGPT but also Codex, its model dedicated to AI-assisted programming, as well as ChatGPT Work, a platform that allows users to access other external applications.

Its business customer segment, which generates higher revenue and margins per user, became a priority for the company in late 2025. Since then, it has closed some of the gap with its major rival Anthropic, which focuses on this class of clients.

The emergence of AI agents – which perform tasks on demand, evaluate their results, and make improvements autonomously – has sent demand for computing power skyrocketing and caused costs to soar for businesses and developers.

Eager to keep those costs down, many are now turning to models that are less sophisticated than the cutting-edge AI systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, including open-source models, particularly those from China.

In early July, OpenAI released three versions of its new model, GPT-5.6, including a "low-cost" version, Luna, which costs one-fifth as much as the highest-performing model, Sol. But the market is evolving so rapidly that the company went even further on Thursday by cutting Luna's price by 80%, placing it among the least expensive advanced models, including those developed in China.