OpenAI Says Its Models Now Reach More Than 1 Billion Active Users and 2 Million Businesses

OpenAI said last Friday that its models now reach more than 1 billion active users and more than 2 million businesses, a milestone that arrived less than four years after ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

“Our models now reach more than one billion active users and more than two million businesses. As people gain confidence in the technology, they use it more deeply,” the company said in a blog post, as reported by AFP via BNN Bloomberg. For comparison, AFP noted that Facebook took six years after launch to reach 1 billion users.

The count isn’t just ChatGPT. It spans OpenAI’s consumer and business products, including ChatGPT, the Codex coding agent and ChatGPT Work, according to TechRepublic. OpenAI didn’t say whether the figure is weekly or monthly.

Heavier use over time

OpenAI also gave a few engagement numbers. Six months after joining, users send about 50% more messages a day and use ChatGPT for about twice as many kinds of work, the company said. It added that agentic work through Codex now accounts for 99.8% of its weekly output tokens.

The milestone came later than OpenAI had hoped. According to several U.S. outlets cited by AFP, the company expected to reach it earlier this year, after it hit 900 million weekly active users in late February, a jump TechCrunch reported at the time. Competition from rivals slowed the climb.

Price cuts to keep growing

The announcement landed a day after OpenAI cut prices on two of the three GPT-5.6 models it released in early July. GPT-5.6 Luna dropped 80%, to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, and GPT-5.6 Terra fell 20%, to $2 and $12. Pricing for the top model, Sol, didn’t change. OpenAI said engineering work cut its end-to-end serving costs by 20%.

“When the cost of useful intelligence falls, more work becomes worth doing,” OpenAI said.

The cuts follow pressure from Anthropic, which has focused on business customers, and from cheaper open-source models, including several from China, that many companies have turned to as AI agents push up their computing bills. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had weighed the price reductions for weeks as customers pushed back on costs, according to TechRepublic.

OpenAI made business customers a priority in late 2025 because they bring higher revenue and margins per user, AFP reported. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar had already called 2026 a year focused on practical adoption, CNBC reported in January.