According to The Information, information disclosed internally by OpenAI shows that ChatGPT’s weekly active users are about to surpass the 1 billion mark, six months later than initially expected.
The company had originally expected to reach this milestone by the end of last year. It now appears that the target will be reached 7 months later than initially expected.
The slower-than-expected growth is the result of both external market competition and internal product challenges. Externally, the chatbot market is no longer dominated by a single player. Competitors such as Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude have risen rapidly, continuing to draw away users and putting noticeable pressure on ChatGPT’s market share.
Internally, the next-generation large model GPT-5, released by OpenAI last autumn, failed to effectively boost growth. The model reportedly encountered multiple setbacks during development, and after its official launch, it was criticized by a large number of users due to user experience issues. This caused the platform’s weekly active user growth to decline after the release, becoming one of the key factors dragging down overall growth.