ChatGPT says 1.2 billion people use it weekly, and most of that use is casual
OpenAI's weekly users rose from 800 million to 1.2 billion in a year. In February 2026 about 1 in 18 paid, and most messages were personal.
Who uses AI, and how deeply
People in each group. Log scale: each gridline is 10× the previous. Blue = reported by OpenAI. Grey = Andrej Karpathy's rough estimates.
What this measures: How the world splits by how much AI people use, from those who have barely tried a chatbot to the few thousand people working inside AI labs.
The three grey bars are one researcher's rough estimate, which he calls “napkin math”. Nobody has measured these groups. The two blue bars are company figures from different months.
Karpathy's tiers describe the whole world (about 8 billion people) and are not a breakdown of ChatGPT's users; his shares add up to about 95%. OpenAI does not say how it counts or deduplicates weekly users, and its latest subscriber count (February 2026) is seven months older than its 1.2 billion figure, so the two should not be divided. Groups overlap: a paying subscriber is also a weekly user.
Show data table and sources
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Have barely used AI | 6 billion | about 75% of people · Karpathy's estimate |
| Use ChatGPT in a given week (Sept 2026) | 1.2 billion | OpenAI-reported · Karpathy puts casual users of all free chatbots at 1–2 billion |
| Pay for ChatGPT (Feb 2026) | 50 million | “more than 50 million” consumer subscribers · OpenAI-reported |
| Use frontier models and agents for professional math and code | 20 million | about 0.2% of people · Karpathy's estimate |
| Work with unreleased systems inside AI labs | 5,000 | Karpathy's estimate |
- Post describing a “sharp funnel” of AI use (Andrej Karpathy)
- DevDay 2026 Recap (OpenAI)
- Scaling AI for everyone (OpenAI)
At its developer event on 29 September 2026, OpenAI said ChatGPT had 1.2 billion weekly users. Its earlier figures were 100 million in 2023, more than 800 million in October 2025 and more than 900 million in February 2026.
The headline hides how lightly most people use it. In February 2026 OpenAI reported more than 50 million paying subscribers against more than 900 million weekly users, so roughly 1 in 18 paid. A working paper by OpenAI economists with Harvard’s David Deming found that messages about something other than work grew from 53% to over 70% of use. Even within one paid plan, depth varies: OpenAI found a heavy user drew on the model’s reasoning features 7× as much as a typical one.
The researcher Andrej Karpathy sketched the whole picture in October 2026, calling it napkin maths. About 6 billion people have barely touched AI. Between 1 and 2 billion use free chatbots occasionally, much like a search engine. About 20 million use the most capable models for professional coding and maths work. About 5,000 people inside AI labs work with systems nobody else has seen.
What it means
Big user numbers are not the same as big changes to work. Most of the 1.2 billion are using a free chatbot now and then, often for personal things, which is closer to how people use a search engine than to the automation of anyone’s job. The small group doing serious professional work with the newest models is also the group whose experience fills the news, which is one reason public opinion about what AI can do is so split.
Caveats
- Every user and subscriber figure here comes from OpenAI itself. Its recap calls the 1.2 billion its combined weekly users and does not say how it counts them or avoids counting the same person twice. The subscriber count has not been updated since February 2026.
- Karpathy’s tiers are a personal estimate, not a measurement. They cover the whole world, not ChatGPT’s users, and no survey or usage data sits behind them.
- The heavy-user comparison covers one paid plan (Plus) only, and uses reasoning features as a stand-in for depth of use.
- The paper on work versus non-work messages uses OpenAI’s internal data, with the messages sorted by machine.