OpenAI statistics 2026

OpenAI revenue timeline

• July 2025: OpenAI doubled its revenue in the first seven months of 2025 to $12 billion on an annualized basis, while expecting to burn roughly $8 billion in cash that year (The Information) (PYMNTS, 2025)
• Full year 2025: about $13 billion in revenue, according to leaked financials, with spending significantly higher (TechCrunch, 2026)
• Q1 2026: $5.7 billion in revenue; Q2 2026: $6.7 billion (The Wall Street Journal) (TechCrunch, 2026)
• October 2026: annualized revenue approaching $50 billion (Financial Times), about $20 billion less than an earlier Axios report of nearly $70 billion (TechCrunch, 2026)

Where the revenue comes from

• More than 50 million paying consumer subscribers in February 2026 (OpenAI via ITdaily, 2026)
• 1 million business customers in November 2025, counting both ChatGPT for Work and direct API customers (eWEEK, 2025)
• ChatGPT Go launched in August 2025 at a price below $5 per month (TechCrunch, 2026)
• Advertising: ads in ChatGPT started in the US in February 2026 and in Europe in August 2026; India starts with 50 brands and a minimum daily budget of ₹725 (about $7.60) (TechCrunch, 2026)

ChatGPT growth in weekly users

• 2023 (first DevDay): 100 million weekly ChatGPT users (OpenAI DevDay 2025 keynote, via Simon Willison)
• March 2025: 500 million people used ChatGPT every week (TechCrunch, 2025)
• August 2025: 700 million weekly active users (OpenAI via ITdaily, 2026)
• October 2025: more than 800 million weekly users (OpenAI DevDay 2025 keynote, via Simon Willison)
• February 2026: more than 900 million weekly users (OpenAI via ITdaily, 2026)
• India alone accounts for more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users (TechCrunch, 2026)

How people use ChatGPT

• chatgpt.com was the #7 website worldwide in October 2026, with an average visit of 6 minutes 31 seconds, 4.75 pages per visit and a 23.96% bounce rate (estimate) (Similarweb, 2026)
• The share of non-work messages rose from 53% to more than 70% of all usage (NBER, 2025)
• Practical guidance, seeking information and writing together account for nearly 80% of all conversations (NBER, 2025)
• 34% of US adults have used ChatGPT, rising to 58% of adults under 30 (Pew Research Center, 2025)

OpenAI funding history

• December 2015: founded as a nonprofit; $1 billion was pledged by Musk, Altman, Brockman and others, but tax filings show only $133 million received by 2021 (Wikipedia, 2026)
• 2019: Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI LP (Wikipedia, 2026)
• January 23, 2023: Microsoft announced the third phase of its partnership, a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment following earlier investments in 2019 and 2021 (Microsoft, 2023)
• Microsoft's 2023 investment is reported at $10 billion, bringing its total to over $13 billion (Wikipedia, 2026)
• March 31, 2025: $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation, led by SoftBank with Microsoft, Coatue, Altimeter and Thrive (TechCrunch, 2025)
• October 2025: an employee share sale of up to $10 billion valued OpenAI at $500 billion (Wikipedia, 2026)
• February 27, 2026: $110 billion at a $730 billion pre-money valuation: Amazon $50 billion (of which $35 billion conditional), Nvidia $30 billion, SoftBank $30 billion (TechCrunch, 2026)
• March 2026: the round closed at $122 billion (TechCrunch, 2026)

Structure and partners

• October 28, 2025: restructured into OpenAI Group PBC; the OpenAI Foundation's stake is valued at about $130 billion and Microsoft's 27% at about $135 billion (Engadget, 2025)
• OpenAI committed to spend $250 billion on Microsoft Azure; Microsoft keeps IP rights to OpenAI's models and products through 2032 (Engadget, 2025)
• Microsoft's commercial remaining performance obligation grew 84% to $678 billion; excluding OpenAI it grew 25% (Microsoft, 2026)
• Amazon: an earlier $38 billion AWS compute commitment was expanded by $100 billion in February 2026 (TechCrunch, 2026)

API prices per 1M tokens (input / output, November 2026)

• gpt-5.5: $5.00 / $30.00 (OpenAI API pricing, 2026)
• gpt-5: $1.25 / $10.00 (OpenAI API pricing, 2026)
• gpt-5-mini: $0.25 / $2.00 (OpenAI API pricing, 2026)
• gpt-5-nano: $0.05 / $0.40 (OpenAI API pricing, 2026)
• gpt-4o: $2.50 / $10.00; gpt-4o-mini: $0.15 / $0.60 (OpenAI API pricing, 2026)
• o3 and gpt-4.1: $2.00 / $8.00 (OpenAI API pricing, 2026)

OpenAI's share of enterprise API spend

• OpenAI held 27% of US enterprise LLM API spend in 2025, down from 50% in 2023; Anthropic 40%, Google 21% (Menlo Ventures, 2025)
• In coding, Anthropic holds an estimated 54% versus 21% for OpenAI (Menlo Ventures, 2025)
• US enterprises spent $37 billion on generative AI in 2025, up from $11.5 billion in 2024 (survey of 495 decision-makers) (Menlo Ventures, 2025)

Enterprise milestones

• First four months of ChatGPT Enterprise: 260 enterprise customers and more than 150,000 registered employees (PYMNTS, 2024)
• September 2024: more than 1 million paying business users across Enterprise, Team and Edu, up from 600,000 in April (PYMNTS, 2024)
• In an OpenAI survey of 4,700 business users, 92% reported higher productivity, 88% time savings and 75% more creativity (PYMNTS, 2024)
• October 2026: Uber rolls out ChatGPT Work to all of its roughly 30,000 employees after a 1,000-person pilot; about 80% of early users were not engineers (TechCrunch, 2026)

AI in business beyond OpenAI

• Microsoft, OpenAI's largest shareholder, has more than 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats; GitHub Copilot has 50 million users (Microsoft, 2026)
• 86.4% of marketing teams use AI in at least a few areas; 37.7% name AI chatbots such as ChatGPT as their biggest planned investment increase (1,500+ marketers) (HubSpot State of Marketing, 2026)
• 17% of Dutch companies used AI in 2025, rising to 66% of companies with 250 or more employees (CBS, 2025)

Leadership changes

• November 17, 2023: Sam Altman removed as CEO by the board; November 21, 2023: Altman and Greg Brockman returned (Wikipedia, 2026)
• May 2024: Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever left and founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. (Wikipedia, 2026)
• September 2024: CTO Mira Murati left the company (Wikipedia, 2026)
• October 2025: an employee share sale of up to $10 billion at a $500 billion valuation (Wikipedia, 2026)

Lawsuits

• Late December 2023: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft over training on its content (Wikipedia, 2026)
• February 29, 2024: Elon Musk sued OpenAI and Sam Altman; OpenAI countersued on April 9, 2024; Musk lost the lawsuit in May 2026 (Wikipedia, 2026)

Regulation

• March 30, 2023: Italy's data protection authority imposed an immediate temporary limitation on ChatGPT's processing of Italian users' data; OpenAI had 20 days to respond, with fines of up to €20 million or 4% of worldwide turnover (Garante Privacy, 2023)
• EU AI Act: obligations for general-purpose AI model providers apply from August 2, 2025; the Commission can enforce them with fines from August 2, 2026; older models have until August 2, 2027 (European Commission, 2025)
• Digital Services Act: ChatGPT designated a Very Large Online Search Engine on August 31, 2026 (159.1 million average monthly users in the EU) (European Commission, 2026)

Impact on labor

• Almost 40% of global employment is exposed to AI; about 60% of jobs in advanced economies, 40% in emerging markets and 26% in low-income countries (IMF, 2024)
• 28% of employed US adults use ChatGPT for work, up from 8% in early 2023 (Pew Research Center, 2025)

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