OpenAI reaches 1 billion users milestone, cuts GPT-5.6 prices by 80% to fight AI rivals

ChatGPT nears 1bn weekly users, seven months late

ChatGPT is on the verge of 1 billion weekly active users, making it one of the fastest internet products in history to that scale. It is also arriving seven months after OpenAI hoped to be there, the first real sign that even the leader in consumer AI is bumping up against its own forecasts. ChatGPT is about to hit 1 billion weekly active users. OpenAI wanted to be here seven months ago. The chatbot is on the verge of the milestone, based on figures OpenAI has shared internally, The Information reported. The company had hoped to reach a billion weekly users by the end of last year. It is arriving in the middle of 2026 instead. Late, and still the fastest ever The delay barely dents the achievement. ChatGPT is one of the fastest internet products in history to reach this scale, and it has done it in under four years. Roughly one in eight people online now open it in a given week, for everything from code to medical questions. The climb has been steep. ChatGPT had about 400 million weekly users in February 2025. Sam Altman put the figure at 800 million by October, and it passed 900 million in February 2026. In June it became the fastest app ever to reach a billion monthly users. Missing its own targets The seven-month miss is the more revealing number. It is the first real sign that even the runaway leader in consumer AI is bumping against its own forecasts. Growth at a billion users is far harder to sustain than growth at a hundred million. Competition is not helping. Google's Gemini and a wave of cheaper Chinese models are chipping at the edges. Rivals no longer trail as far behind as they did a year ago. OpenAI still leads by a distance, but the lead is being defended, not extended. Why the number matters The user count is not just a bragging right. It underpins the valuation behind OpenAI's march toward an IPO, and the case that consumer attention, not only enterprise contracts, will pay for the compute. Sceptics such as Gary Marcus argue those expectations have run ahead of the business. A billion people a week is a powerful answer, even if it landed later than promised.

OpenAI surpasses 1 billion users after cutting GPT-5.6 prices

OpenAI disclosed that its models now reach more than one billion active users and more than two million businesses, an announcement that followed price reductions on two models in its GPT-5.6 family. The company cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20%. Luna is now priced at $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, down from $1 and $6. Terra's rates fell to $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output tokens, from $2.50 and $15. Pricing for Sol, the most capable model in the family, remains unchanged, the company said. OpenAI attributed the reductions to efficiency improvements made during internal development of GPT-5.6, including the model's role in optimizing production software and improving speculative decoding. Those efforts reduced end-to-end serving costs by 20% and increased token-generation efficiency by more than 15%, the company said. The company also said improvements to context management raised GPT-5.6 Sol's score on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark from 13.3% to 38.3% while using six times fewer output tokens. "When the cost of useful intelligence falls, more work becomes worth doing," the company said. The pricing changes come at a moment when enterprise customers have grown wary of high AI spending, according to The Wall Street Journal. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged earlier this year that pricing had emerged as a growing problem for customers, the Journal reported. The Journal had previously reported that OpenAI spent several weeks deliberating over reductions as its leadership grew increasingly concerned about Anthropic making its Claude models cheaper. Enterprise customers have grown reluctant to authorize large AI expenditures without a clear picture of returns, and cheaper Chinese open-weight models have intensified the competitive environment. Anthropic's mid-tier Claude Sonnet 4.6 carries a price of $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, putting it above Terra's new rates. OpenAI also said that six months after signing up, users send roughly 50% more messages per day and use ChatGPT for about twice as many types of tasks. Agentic work through Codex now accounts for 99.8% of weekly output tokens across the company, OpenAI said. The company is operating at a loss as it continues to spend on model development and infrastructure. OpenAI's financials showed revenue of $13.07 billion in 2025 against a net loss of $38.5 billion.

OpenAI Reaches 1 Billion Active Users as AI Becomes Daily Habit | PYMNTS.com

OpenAI has found that these users deploy artificial intelligence (AI) more often and more deeply as they gain confidence in it. Among individuals, after six months of using the technology, people send 50% more messages each day and use ChatGPT for twice as many kinds of work. Among businesses, companies often start using AI with one team or workflow and then expand adoption across operations, Friar said. "We are still early," Friar said. "More capable systems will complete longer projects, coordinate across tools, and handle more of the work between an idea and a finished result. Individuals and small businesses will gain capabilities once available only to much larger organizations. Enterprises will apply intelligence more broadly across their operations." The PYMNTS Intelligence report "The AI On-Ramp: Data Shows How Everyday Tasks Build Consumer Habits" found that the way the use of generative AI will become a mass habit is through small, repeatable tasks people do everyday. Some of the most common, truly universal usages of AI are finding product links, drafting texts or emails, and symptom lookup, according to the report. Another PYMNTS Intelligence report, "Financial Services Pull Ahead in the Enterprise AI Race," found that while all enterprise sectors have jumped into AI, financial services and insurance firms are among those with the highest adoption. The industry's most adopted use cases include structured, auditable back-office functions, per the report. Friar's blog post came a day after OpenAI announced that it made changes to the price or the performance of three of its AI models to improve their performance per dollar across enterprise workloads. OpenAI cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80%, cut the price of GPT-5.6 Terra by 20% and provided faster performance of GPT-5.6 Sol in the API while leaving its price unchanged. Friar said in her blog post: "These are not simply changes to a price list. They expand the range of work that becomes practical and give customers more flexibility to balance intelligence, speed, reliability and cost."

ChatGPT Approaches 1 Billion Weekly Active User Milestone | PYMNTS.com

That's according to a report Wednesday (July 29) by The Information, citing company data, which notes that this milestone comes seven months later than the artificial intelligence (AI) startup had initially projected. Nonetheless, the report said, ChatGPT is still among the fast-growing apps in the history of the internet, achieving this scale in under four years. The Information added that the road to 1 billion users was a difficult one, with growth slowing last fall after the user backlash to the GPT-5 model, and increased competition. Among ChatGPT's main rivals is Google's Gemini AI, which has 950 million monthly active users and the advantage of its integration with its parent company's search engine. OpenAI is also facing a challenge from Anthropic, which recently surpassed OpenAI in terms of revenue thanks to its popularity among enterprise customers. That's led OpenAI to pivot aggressively toward business clients, The Information report said. Sarah Friar, the company's chief financial officer, noted recently that these clients make up 40% of OpenAI's revenue, with that number expected to reach 50% by year's end. Meanwhile, OpenAI projects $25 billion in revenue this year after bringing in $10 billion last year, while also forecasting $25 billion in cash burn, the report added. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned employees heading into this year of "rough vibes" in light of Google's momentum, the company still holds a significant lead in paid consumer adoption, with over 50 million paying subscribers, The Information said. ChatGPT reached 1 billion global monthly active app users in May, the fastest application in history to reach that scale. "Google Maps, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube each needed between five and eight years to reach the same threshold. ChatGPT did it in three," PYMNTS wrote in June. That growth is in line with what PYMNTS Intelligence has monitored in consumer behavior, with research showing that more than 60% of consumers now begin daily planning, learning and shopping inside AI platforms. That means "not layering AI on top of existing habits but replacing those habits outright," the report said. Product discovery is the "clearest signal of that shift," the report continued, with additional research showing 31.4% of AI users turned to generative AI to find product links in February. Research from PYMNTS Intelligence has also shown the overall popularity of ChatGPT compared to its rivals, with 83% of AI users trying the platform at least once.

OpenAI says has more than 1 billion active users

OpenAI announced on Friday 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 U.S. 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 percent, placing it among the least expensive advanced models, including those developed in China.