- OpenAI’s VP and head of the ChatGPT app, Nick Turley, announced that ChatGPT is on track to reach 700 million weekly active users.
- OpenAI is also seeing huge revenue growth, surging from $10 billion in June to $13 billion in July in annual recurring revenue.
- Apart from that, OpenAI has introduced break reminders in ChatGPT to encourage shorter chat sessions.
ChatGPT is seeing explosive growth, and it’s close to reaching 700 million active users per week. Nick Turley, OpenAI’s VP and head of the ChatGPT app, announced the milestone on X: “This week, ChatGPT is on track to reach 700M weekly active users — up from 500M at the end of March and 4× since last year.”
The surge in ChatGPT’s user growth is largely attributed to GPT-4o’s image generation feature that led to the viral Ghibli trend earlier in April. With the upcoming GPT-5 release, ChatGPT is expected to gain even more users in the coming months. As for Google Gemini, CEO Sundar Pichai recently tweeted that Gemini has over 450 million monthly active users.
Apart from that, OpenAI is also seeing huge revenue growth from paying customers. CNBC reported that paying business customers of ChatGPT have soared to 5 million, up from 3 million a few months ago.
OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) also surged to $13 billion, an increase from $10 billion in June, and it’s expected to hit $20 billion by year-end. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s rival Anthropic has seen a revenue jump from $4 billion in June to $5 billion in July. The company is aiming to hit $9 billion by year-end.
Since ChatGPT is popular among consumers, OpenAI earns its revenue mostly from consumer subscriptions, followed by business customers. On the API side, Anthropic has overtaken OpenAI and now earns $3.1 billion, compared to OpenAI’s $2.9 billion, according to The Information.
Anthropic is earning more from coding tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot, thanks to powerful models like Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4.
Apart from that, OpenAI is also making changes to ChatGPT to make it less sycophantic and grounded in honesty. In April, OpenAI pulled back an update to ChatGPT that made it too agreeable and sycophantic to user queries.
Going forward, in high-stakes personal situations, ChatGPT will not offer direct advice; instead, it will guide the user through thoughtful reflection. In addition, ChatGPT is introducing break reminders during long chats to encourage shorter sessions if goals are achieved quickly.
