OpenAI’s ChatGPT was launched in 2022 as a powerful tool with generative AI-powered capabilities. The chatbot instantly gained popularity with over a million users worldwide. After years of being in the competitive edge, ChatGPT is gradually losing its dominance in the AI assistant market, as its market share slipped below 50% for the first time, according to Sensor Tower’s State of AI Report 2026 via TechCrunch. 

The report highlighted that ChatGPT remains the world’s most used AI assistant with over 1.1 billion monthly users despite the growing competition with Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and others. However, the data showed that ChatGPT's market share declined to 46.4 per cent by May-end. 

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On the other hand, rivals such as Gemini and Claude expanded their presence to 27.7 per cent and 10.3 per cent, respectively. Whereas Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Meta AI remained below the 5 per cent mark individually.

In terms of users, Gemini has 662 million monthly users, and Claude has around 245 million users. This reflects a massive gap between the world’s most popular AI assistants. In addition to a lowered market share, the report further highlighted that users are no longer using just one AI assistant. They are frequently switching between AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others based on their tasks and features.

It is suggested that AI apps are expected to generate nearly 2.3 billion downloads in the first half of 2026, which is more than $4.2 billion in consumer spending during the same period. Consumers also spent about $1.83 billion on AI apps in the first half of the previous year. However, the market's growth is starting to slow down.

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Now, OpenAI is reportedly making several changes to how it offers its AI services via ChatGPT. Firstly, the company has gradually started to show ads to ChatGPT as a new revenue stream. In addition, it is also said to focus more on its enterprise offerings. The company is also reported to be building a “super app” which is expected to be a revamped version of ChatGPT, but with expanded features and offerings.