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ChatGPTs market share slips below 50% for first time
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More than three and a half years after ChatGPT’s initial release, AI assistants are now used by millions of people worldwide, and the competitive landscape is changing fast. While OpenAI’s chatbot is still the most popular assistant worldwide, globally, its market share has dipped below 50% for the first time as users are migrating between different assistants like Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower’s State of AI Report for 2026. ChatGPT’s growth has been impressive. It became the fastest app ever to reach 1 billion monthly users, as Sensor Tower reported this month. Notably, OpenAI counts weekly active users, and it last reported 900 million of them in February. The chatbot still remains the most popular AI assistant worldwide with over 1.1 billion monthly users, followed by Gemini with 662 million and Claude with 245 million. Image Credits: Sensor TowerImage Credits:Sensor Tower Until January, ChatGPT commanded over 50% market share, but by May’s end, it had fallen to 46.4% thanks to the rise of Gemini (27.7%) and Claude (10.3%). Other assistants, including Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI, have less than 5% market share. Image Credits: Sensor TowerImage Credits:Sensor Tower Sensor Tower’s State of AI Report also found that users are increasingly willing to switch between assistants. Specific events appear to accelerate that behavior: OpenAI’s deal with the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in February triggered a measurable spike in uninstalls, for example — suggesting brand trust and values alignment matter to users, not just features. While Gemini’s momentum is largely due to its integration with Google’s broader ecosystem of tools, Anthropic’s Claude has gained a strong reputation for productivity use cases and is closing in on ChatGPT’s user retention rate. In the first half of 2026, people are on pace to download nearly 2.3 billion AI apps and spend over $4.2 billion on them, according to Sensor Tower estimates. That compares to $1.83 billion in spending in H1 2025 — a jump that suggests the industry is shifting its focus from pure growth toward monetization. That said, both download and spend growth rates have decelerated, an indicator that the market may be maturing even as absolute numbers climb. Regionally, Asia recorded the first download decline of 3.3% in Q1 2026, drive by dips in China and India. Despite leading globally in total downloads, Asia trails North America and Europe when it comes to in-app spending — a split that matters for companies deciding where to invest in premium features and monetization. Image Credits: Sensor TowerImage Credits:Sensor Tower In the U.S., users are gravitating toward AI assistants for productivity tasks and spending more on premium features. Across platforms, average revenue per user has grown industry-wide, but Claude is standing out. Thirteen percent of Anthropic’s users are paying for a subscription plan — a conversion rate that leads the field and will be a metric worth watching for investors evaluating which AI businesses are building lasting revenue. Sensor Tower estimates that the hours spent on AI apps will have increased from 17.2 billion hours in H1 2025 to roughly 36 billion hours in H1 2026. The top three assistants command 89% time spent on AI assistant apps. Meanwhile, adjacent categories like AI companions or AI content generation apps remain fragmented and wide open to competition, which represents both a risk and an opportunity depending on which players move first. OpenAI started experimenting with ads in ChatGPT in February. According to Sensor Tower, the company has scaled the number of ads gradually, along with the share of users who see them. By May, an average of 17% of daily users were being served ads — a number to watch as ChatGPT’s monetization strategy evolves beyond subscriptions. Image Credits: Sensor TowerImage Credits:Sensor Tower Software and shopping are the largest
Professional services firm KPMG has pulled a report titled, “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI,” after numerous organizations said the report’s claims about their AI usage were untrue. Research group GPTZero identified a number of inaccuracies in the report, which was published in October 2025. GPTZero told the FT that the inaccuracies stemmed from AI hallucinations. In other words, the professional services firm appears to have used AI to help write a report about AI. UBS, the UK’s National Health Service, Swiss Federal Railways, and Transport for London all told the FT that the report’s claims about their AI usage were either untrue or misleading. A KPMG spokesperson said the firm removed the report from its websites while conducting its own investigation. “We expect all our people to follow our guidelines on the responsible use of AI, including human oversight to validate content and verify independent sources,” the spokesperson said. Last month, EY withdrew a report on loyalty rewards programs that appeared to include fake footnotes and AI hallucinations.
In Brief Posted: 8:53 PM PDT · June 10, 2026 Image Credits:Jason Henry/Bloomberg / Getty Images If founders and other business leaders weren’t already envious of Dario Amodei, who sits atop one of the world’s fastest-growing AI companies — currently valued by private market investors at roughly the trillion-dollar mark little more than five years after it was founded — they’re going to be seriously envious now. In a new sit-down with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, he reveals he has just one direct report; that’s his chief of staff. Everyone else on Anthropic’s executive team reports to his sister, co-founder and President Daniela Amodei, who handles day-to-day operations. Anyone who has managed a large team knows that the people side of the job has a way of consuming everything else. Amodei’s arrangement frees him to focus almost entirely on strategy, culture, research direction, and sweeping essays on the future of civilization (with footnotes!). “It’s incredibly freeing,” he tells Chang. It’s a highly unusual structure. OpenAI’s Sam Altman reportedly has around half a dozen direct reports, which is far more standard, while Nvidia’s Jensen Huang — another extreme outlier — has many dozens. Topics Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news Latest in AI
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