ChatGPT Reaches 1 Billion Users as the AI Economy Takes Shape

ChatGPT reached 1 billion global monthly active app users in May, CNBC reported on Friday (June 12), making it the fastest application in history to reach that scale.

Google Maps, TikTok, Instagram and YouTube each needed between five and eight years to reach the same threshold. ChatGPT did it in three.

The growth tracks what PYMNTS Intelligence has been measuring in consumer behavior for months. More than 60% of consumers now begin daily planning, learning and shopping inside AI platforms—not layering AI on top of existing habits but replacing those habits outright. That’s according to a PYMNTS Intelligence survey of 2,113 U.S. adults that tracked adoption across 54 personal-use cases spanning shopping, finance, health, education and travel.

Discovery Is Where the Habit Locks In

Product discovery is the clearest signal of that shift. A separate PYMNTS Intelligence report found that 31.4% of AI users turned to generative AI to find product links in February—the highest adoption rate of any personal AI task in the dataset—with month-to-month variance of just 2.6 percentage points, the tightest of any task measured. Low variance at high volume is the signature of a settled habit.

As of January, 41% of consumers had used dedicated AI platforms for product discovery and 43% said they had fully replaced their prior methods. These shoppers are not running searches on Google and cross-checking with ChatGPT. They open ChatGPT first and ignore Google altogether.

Overall U.S. adult AI adoption crossed 54% in January, up ten points in a single month. ChatGPT sits at the center of that adoption. The app posted 62% year-over-year growth, with OpenAI processing 2.5 billion prompts per day across the platform as of last July.

A Competitive Market

The billion-user milestone lands as the AI category draws clearer structural lines. According to a June 2 report from U.S. News, Anthropic’s Claude counted 56 million global monthly active users as of the second quarter—a fraction of ChatGPT’s base but growing at approximately 640% year on year.

Sensor Tower found that U.S. ChatGPT users who installed Claude in the first quarter of 2026 spent 5% less time on ChatGPT in the month following installation, compared with their prior eight-month average.

Consumer AI has a dominant platform and a fast-moving challenger, with mass-market and developer-enterprise lanes diverging. The revenue curve runs alongside the user curve. OpenAI’s annualized revenue surpassed $20 billion in 2025, up from $6 billion in 2024, and exceeded $25 billion by May.

Commerce Infrastructure Catches Up

Shopping and product discovery are among the earliest environments where agentic behavior has taken practical hold, because consumers can tolerate small errors and repeat actions easily. That tolerance gives AI platforms room to embed, which is how habits harden into defaults.

PYMNTS Intelligence noted that one-third of consumers prefer linking a digital wallet directly to an AI platform to complete purchases, with redirecting to a merchant site ranking second.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are now moving toward public markets. OpenAI submitted a confidential S-1 with the SEC at a reported valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic filed its own prospectus a week earlier at $965 billion.