OpenAI's Weekly Active Users Exceed 400 Million

OpenAI's weekly active users surpassed 400 million in February, marking significant growth in artificial intelligence adoption, a company spokesperson said Thursday.

The Microsoft-backed startup had 300 million weekly active users in December. Its paying business users also exceeded 2 million in February, more than doubling since its last update in September.

The increase comes as China's DeepSeek introduced an AI model it claims can rival or outperform Western alternatives at a lower cost, raising concerns about U.S. dominance in generative AI.

DeepSeek has since faced outages due to high demand. Questions have also emerged regarding how the company acquired Nvidia's H800 chips, which are used to train AI models, despite U.S. export restrictions to China.

OpenAI reported a twofold rise in developer traffic for its reasoning models over the past six months and a fivefold increase for its o3 model since its launch in late January.

CNBC first reported OpenAI's latest user figures earlier on Thursday.

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• OpenAI's weekly active users surpassed 400 million in February

• Paying business users exceeded 2 million, doubling since September

• China's DeepSeek AI model raised concerns about U.S. AI dominance

Source: REUTERS