OpenAI is growing fast, driven by major partnerships like Microsoft, frequent AI model updates, and broader product integration desspite strong competition from Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and others.
OpenAI’s weekly active users reached 400 million in February, a 33% jump from 300 million in December, according to COO Brad Lightcap in an interview with CNBC.
Lightcap attributed the growth to ChatGPT’s “natural progression” as it becomes more useful and familiar to a wider audience.
“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it,” Lightcap said in an interview, adding that it takes time for individuals to find use cases that resonate. “There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”
OpenAI’s enterprise business is also growing, with 2 million paying enterprise users—about double since September.
Lightcap noted that many employees use ChatGPT personally and then recommend it to their companies.
“We get a lot of benefits, and a tail wind from the organic consumer adoption where people already have familiarity with the product,” he said. “There’s really healthy growth, on a different curve.”
Developer traffic has also doubled in six months and increased fivefold for OpenAI’s “reasoning” model, o3, according to Lightcap.
Developers use OpenAI to integrate AI into their applications. Major enterprise customers include Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna, and T-Mobile.
Lightcap compared OpenAI’s adoption to cloud services, which AWS pioneered two decades ago. While consumer growth is faster due to individual adoption, he said enterprise adoption is still “building up.”
“There’s a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business,” Lightcap said. “AI is going to be like cloud services. 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’s growth comes as it faces new competition from China’s DeepSeek, which shook tech markets in January. Investors feared it could challenge U.S. AI dominance and profitability.
Megacap tech stocks suffered, with Nvidia losing 17% in one day, erasing nearly $600 billion in market value.
