ChatGPT's Weekly Active Users to Soon Surpass 100 Million, Half a Year Behind Schedule but Still Record-Breaking

According to internal disclosures by OpenAI, the company's chatbot ChatGPT is on track to surpass 100 million weekly active users (WAU). Although this milestone is about seven months behind the company's original target of achieving it by the end of last year, ChatGPT has accumulated such a massive user base in less than four years since its launch, making it one of the fastest-growing applications in internet history.

The report indicates that the slowdown in ChatGPT's growth has been influenced by multiple factors. Firstly, there is strong competition from Google Gemini AI, which is accelerating its integration with the Google search engine that has tens of billions of users. Secondly, OpenAI encountered development setbacks when it launched the GPT-5 model last autumn, which caused dissatisfaction among some users and led to a drop in growth at the time. Additionally, the competitor Anthropic's Claude chatbot has successfully captured a portion of the market share.

To address competitive pressure, OpenAI has turned to strengthening its enterprise deployment. CFO Sarah Friar stated that enterprise customers have contributed 40% of the company's revenue and are expected to increase to 50% by the end of the year.

ChatGPT is also evolving into an 'AI agent' that can work with Gmail and calendars to handle tasks and has released a desktop 'super app' that integrates multiple autonomous execution capabilities.

Currently, various evaluations show that Google is still behind OpenAI and Anthropic in the development progress of AI programs. CEO Sam Altman has also warned employees that the company will face 'difficult times.' Among them, Anthropic, with its strong enterprise revenue and network security capabilities, is becoming a formidable competitor for OpenAI.