OpenAI, an American Artificial Intelligence research organization, has continued to experience remarkable growth despite increasing competition in the AI space.
The San Francisco-based AI powerhouse is reported to have seen a significant increase in its user base, reaching 400 million weekly active users as of February. This represents a 33% increase from December’s 300 million, according to Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap.
Lightcap referenced the natural progression of the company’s AI popular chatbot ChatGPT, as it becomes more useful and familiar to a broader group of people. As users discover its diverse applications, the platform gains momentum across both individual and enterprise use cases.
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He said,
“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it. It takes time for individuals to find use cases that resonate. There’s an overall effect of people wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”
The enterprise segment has seen a significant boost, with 2 million paying business users- double the figure reported in September. Organizations across industries, including Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna, and T-Mobile, have integrated OpenAl’s technology into their operations. Additionally, developer engagement has skyrocketed, with traffic doubling in the past six months and usage of OpenAl’s reasoning model, 03, increasing fivefold.
Lightcap compared this trend to the early days of cloud computing, predicting that Al will become an essential backbone for businesses, much like cloud services pioneered by Amazon Web Services.
OpenAI’s impressive weekly user base growth, comes amid the emergence of Deepseek, an AI development firm based in Hangzhou, China. Recall that the Chinese AI firm made headlines in January 2025, worldwide after it topped app download charts, and caused US tech stocks to crash.
The AI firm released its latest model, DeepSeek R1, which it said rivaled technology developed by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in its capabilities while costing far less to create.
Its popularity and potential rattled investors, wiping billions of dollars off the market value of chip giant Nvidia, and called into question whether American firms would dominate the booming artificial intelligence (AI) market, as many assumed they would.
Notably, DeepSeek revealed that it uses less memory compared to its rivals, ultimately reducing the cost of performing tasks for users. That combination of performance and lower cost helped DeepSeek’s AI assistant become the most downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store when it was released in the US.
In line with Deepseek’s emergence, OpenAI accused the company of improperly extracting its model outputs through a technique known as distillation. Also, OpenAI warned that Chinese companies are actively attempting to replicate its advanced AI models, prompting closer cooperation with US authorities.
The Future of OpenAI
Despite the competitive AI landscape, OpenAI’s growth trajectory remains strong. The company has intensified its AI model by rolling—out upgraded features. Earlier this month, it unveiled a ChatGPT tool called “deep research” ahead of high-level meetings in Tokyo.
OpenAI whose ChatGPT fronted generative AI’s emergence into public consciousness in 2022, said its new tool “accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours”.
“Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently if you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst,” it said in a statement.”