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ChatGPT saw 400 million weekly active users as of February, OpenAI chief operating officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC. Of all users, 2 million pay for enterprise accounts, which Lightcap attributed to consumer customers suggesting ChatGPT to their companies. Developer traffic has also increased.
ChatGPT sees increased enterprise and developer adoption
ChatGPT’s weekly active users increased by 33% over the last three months, OpenAI told CNBC. Meanwhile, the number of paying enterprise users has doubled since September. This tracks with people taking time to figure out how to deploy prompts and AI-generated content in their workplaces. It might also be a sign that ChatGPT being marketed as a time-saver is working; companies might purchase the plan first and figure out how to use the technology second. Lightcap said ChatGPT is undergoing a “natural progression” as it becomes more useful and familiar.
OpenAI has also won some very large enterprise customers including T-Mobile and Moderna. Developer demand has jumped, with traffic doubling overall in the last six months and tripling in the case of the reasoning model o1.
“AI is going to be like cloud services,” Lightcap said. “It’s going to be something that you can’t run a business that ultimately is not really running on these very powerful models underneath the surface.”
OpenAI faces more competition as generative AI becomes mainstream
DeepSeek drew comparisons to OpenAI in January. In the interview with CNBC, Lightcap reassured that OpenAI was not changing any plans in reaction to DeepSeek’s dramatic entrance into the American market. Instead, he used it as an opportunity to talk up the ubiquity of generative AI products.
“DeepSeek is a testament to how much AI is like entered the public consciousness in the mainstream — it would have been unfathomable two years ago,” he told CNBC.
Success on both the consumer and enterprise fronts is a good sign for OpenAI, which is in talks to begin a $300 billion funding round. It faces competition from AI companies like DeepSeek and xAI, as well as new ventures by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new Thinking Machines Lab.
DeepSeek had 33.7 million monthly active users across all of its products as of January 2025, according to Backlinko.