ChatGPT is close to reaching 1 billion weekly active users, The Information reported on July 28 local time.

The Information said OpenAI had internally aimed to reach 1 billion weekly users by the end of last year, but the timeline has been delayed by about 7 months.

ChatGPT user growth slowed somewhat from the second half of last year. An analysis said competition intensified as Google strengthened its competitiveness by tightly combining Search and Gemini, while development delays in the GPT-5 launch process and backlash from some users also had an impact. Anthropic's Claude also expanded its market share, further intensifying competition among companies over AI chatbots.

OpenAI is making enterprise generative AI its core growth strategy. Sarah Friar (세라 프라이어), OpenAI's chief financial officer, forecast in January that corporate customers accounted for 40 percent of total revenue and would rise to 50 percent by the end of this year.

Google recently said Gemini has 950,000,000 monthly active users, but did not disclose its weekly user count. AI answers provided on the default screen of its search service and in AI mode are not included in that figure.

In paid services, OpenAI is maintaining an edge. Paid ChatGPT subscribers have surpassed 50,000,000, while Google did not disclose the size of its paid Gemini subscriber base.