OpenAI Hits 400M Weekly Users, Doubles Paid Subscriptions

OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has seen its weekly active users soar past 400 million in February, marking significant growth in AI adoption, a company spokesperson told Reuters on Thursday.

The Microsoft-backed AI giant had 300 million weekly active users in December, and its paying business user base also crossed 2 million last month—more than doubling since its last update in September.

The milestone comes amid increasing competition in the generative AI landscape. China’s DeepSeek recently launched an AI model claiming to rival or outperform Western alternatives at a lower cost, raising questions about U.S. dominance in the space.

However, DeepSeek has faced service outages due to a surge in demand. Meanwhile, OpenAI has reported a twofold increase in developer traffic for its reasoning models over the past six months and a fivefold surge for its o3 model since its late January launch.