SAN FRANCISCO — ChatGPT is still the world’s most popular chatbot, but its grip on the multibillion-dollar race to rewire the economy with artificial intelligence has begun to slip.
The number of users turning to the ChatGPT mobile app each month has plateaued since the summer, according to data from market research firm Sensor Tower. The chatbot’s maker OpenAI has been eclipsed by rivals such as Google on industry benchmarks comparing the capabilities of different AI systems.
The shift suggests rocky times ahead for OpenAI, whose launch of ChatGPT three years ago shattered the cozy control giants like Google, Microsoft and Apple held over the digital economy and the online lives of billions of people.
As ChatGPT rapidly climbed toward the more than 800 million monthly users it boasts today, established tech companies scrambled to respond and Silicon Valley rebuilt its vision for the future around technology pioneered by OpenAI. Companies across the economy and two successive U.S. governments embraced the idea that AI is poised to deliver huge leaps in productivity and efficiency, triggering further investment.
The upshot of ChatGPT’s huge impact is that OpenAI now faces an intense and expensive battle with some of the world’s largest and most profitable companies — without a profitable business of its own.
CEO Sam Altman said on the BG2 podcast in late October that OpenAI had so far made more than $13 billion in revenue in 2025. But analysts estimate the company is losing many billions more. A spokesperson for OpenAI declined to comment for this story.
Jim Reid, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, estimated in a research note Thursday that OpenAI will by 2029 have lost around $140 billion since 2024, an amount that far exceeds the cash burn of successful start-ups in previous tech waves. Google generates about $30 billion in profit each quarter from its search and software empire. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Some investors and analysts now warn that if the AI boom turns out to be a speculative bubble that collapses — as some tech leaders have predicted — OpenAI will struggle to raise the funding needed to stay competitive. With Google’s Gemini chatbot and other rivals gaining ground on ChatGPT, OpenAI could be left behind in the AI race that it started and once seemed set to dominate.
“We’re going to see a situation where ChatGPT was the early winner,” but appears on track to ultimately lose out to others, said Ross Hendricks, an equity analyst at investment research firm Porter and Co. “They’re going to end up just like MySpace did with the inability to truly monetize and break away from the pack,” he said, invoking the pioneering social network that was later buried by rivals like Facebook.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI as capable as humans, to the benefit of all humanity. But its CEO Sam Altman set his company on a more commercial and aggressive path in 2019 with a multibillion dollar alliance with Microsoft.
Sharing AI code with the tech giant in return for funding and computing power led to the breakthrough that birthed ChatGPT in November 2022.
After the chatbot took off, OpenAI’s ambitions quickly expanded and it doubled down on chasing profits, selling subscriptions to ChatGPT and building a business charging other companies to build on its AI technology. Altman argued the company could only deliver on its technological goals by expending huge resources.
OpenAI has now taken on $57 billion in funding from investors, more than any previous start-up according to venture capital data firm PitchBook. Its backers include venture capital firms, Japanese mega-investor SoftBank and the United Arab Emirates’ sovereign wealth fund. Altman has made hundreds of billions in future spending commitments for computer chips and data centers necessary to power the company’s future AI tools.
But recent OpenAI product launches, such as an AI-infused browser called Atlas and social network called Sora for sharing AI-generated video, have not taken off with users in the same way as ChatGPT. And OpenAI’s rivals are beginning to catch up, especially Google which was seen as the leader in AI until ChatGPT came along.
Google said in October that its Gemini chatbot had reached 650 million monthly users, partly thanks to its new image-generation feature Nano Banana going viral on social media.
ChatGPT’s monthly active users worldwide increased by just 5 percent between July and November, while Google’s Gemini AI app grew by 30 percent, according to Sensor Tower. In major European markets, paid subscriptions for ChatGPT have not grown since the summer, Deutsche Bank analysts said in a Wednesday report, citing proprietary transaction data.
Anthropic AI, a start-up founded by former OpenAI employees in 2021, has raised $47 billion in funding according to PitchBook. Its AI coding tool has grown faster than OpenAI’s, according to AI and semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis.
Altman on Monday sent OpenAI employees a “code red” memo ordering more focus on improving ChatGPT and less on developing other products or side businesses, tech news outlet the Information reported.
The same day, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT Nick Turley said in a post on X that ChatGPT was the most popular AI assistant worldwide, while also acknowledging it had serious competition. “New products are launching every week, which is great — it pushes us to move faster and keep raising the bar for what an AI assistant can do,” he wrote.
OpenAI’s has slipped on some industry benchmarks used to compare the ability of different AI systems.
For most of the past three years, the company held the top spot on an “intelligence index” maintained by the company Artificial Analysis, which tests AI models on tasks such as trivia, math and coding. But OpenAI’s lead has been narrower in recent months and Google displaced it as the top performer in November, after releasing its latest version of Gemini. Google’s AI technology is also ranked first by another benchmark, the ARC-AGI leaderboard, which attempts to test how general, or humanlike, AI systems’ intelligence is.
The customers OpenAI needs to win over to increase its revenue are more likely focused on which AI chatbot is most useful in their job, business or personal life — and how much they cost. Established companies like Google have the advantage of being able to integrate their AI tools into products used by billions of people every day and could use their healthy profits to challenge OpenAI on pricing.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, told podcast host Dwarkesh Patel last month that OpenAI and other recent AI start-ups would face tough competition from giants like his own. “They’ll have to compete,” he said of the upstarts. “If they price stuff high, guess what … I’ll substitute you.”
The growing popularity and power of AI models released as free software for anyone to download and modify adds to that pressure. Free, or open, AI models generally lag the best from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, but many firms use them as a cheaper alternative for some tasks.
Reid, the Deutsche Bank analyst, said in his Thursday research note that the path to survival for OpenAI looks narrow.
“OpenAI may continue to attract significant funding and could ultimately develop products that generate substantial profits and revolutionize the world,” he wrote. “But at present, no start-up in history has operated with expected losses on anything approaching this scale. We are firmly in uncharted territory.”
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