ChatGPT hit 1 billion users nearly twice as fast as TikTok did

If you really want to get a feeling for how rapid the rollout of AI is going add ChatGPT's top few competitors (Gemini, Claude and Grok). That brings the number to 2 billion users.

ChatGPT hit 1 billion users nearly twice as fast as TikTok did

Chart R

June 5, 2026

It took Facebook and Instagram around eight years; it took YouTube just over six; even TikTok, which at the time felt like it was a global sensation almost as soon as it arrived, took more than half a decade.

Now, though, the mobile version of ChatGPT has positively left the biggest platforms (and probably all of your other favorite apps) in the dust, hitting 1 billion monthly active users in just three years, per new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, as more users turn to OpenAI’s chatbot each month.

While rival Anthropic might be pulling ahead in terms of annualized recurring revenue, enterprise customer adoption, and valuation, the app version of Claude, a market-leading chatbot on several counts, has clocked only 56 million monthly active users in the quarter to date.

In fact, according to Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, ChatGPT’s monthly active user count for the quarter to date outweighs the figures for Claude, Gemini (472 million), Doubao (106 million), Dola (78 million), DeepSeek (68 million), Meta AI (61 million), Grok (50 million), Perplexity (44 million), and Copilot (31 million)... combined.

ChatGPT made a pretty big splash in the tech world when it landed toward the end of 2022, but there’s no question that the mobile versions — which launched on iOS in May 2023, then on Android a couple months later — helped to catapult the chatbot into the mainstream proper.