More than three and a half years after ChatGPT was first released, AI assistants are now used by millions of people around the world, and the competitive landscape is changing rapidly. While OpenAI’s chatbot remains the world’s most popular assistant, its global market share has fallen below 50% for the first time. This is due to users switching to other assistants such as Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok.
More than three and a half years after ChatGPT was first released, AI assistants are now used by millions of people around the world, and the competitive landscape is changing rapidly. While OpenAI’s chatbot remains the world’s most popular assistant, its global market share has fallen below 50% for the first time. This is due to users switching to other assistants such as Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok.
This is evidenced by the data from the “State of AI Report for 2026” report from the analytical company Sensor Tower, TechCrunch reports .
ChatGPT remains the most popular AI assistant in the world with over 1.1 billion monthly users, followed by Gemini with 662 million and Claude with 245 million.
ChatGPT held over 50% of the market until January, but by the end of May its share had fallen to 46.4% due to the growth of Gemini (27.7%) and Claude (10.3%). Other assistants, including Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI, have less than 5% market share.
Additionally, Sensor Tower's State of Artificial Intelligence report also showed that users are increasingly willing to switch between assistants.
In the first half of 2026, AI app downloads are expected to reach nearly 2.3 billion, with user spending exceeding $4.2 billion. This compares to $1.83 billion in the first half of 2025. This jump suggests that the industry is shifting its focus from pure growth to monetization. However, the growth rates of both downloads and spending have slowed, indicating that the market is likely maturing, even as absolute numbers increase.
By region, Asia saw its first-ever drop in downloads in Q1 2026, at 3.3%, driven by declines in China and India. Despite leading the global pack in total downloads, Asia lags behind North America and Europe when it comes to in-app spending. This gap is important for companies deciding where to invest in premium features and monetization.
In the US, users are gravitating towards AI assistants for work tasks and are spending more on premium features. Across platforms, average revenue per user has increased across the industry, but Claude stands out. 13% of Anthropic’s users pay for a subscription, a conversion rate that is industry-leading and will be an important metric for investors looking to see which AI companies are creating a sustainable revenue stream.
According to Sensor Tower, people are spending twice as much time in AI applications: the figure has increased from 17.2 to almost 36 billion hours compared to last year. At the same time, 89% of all this time is taken by three main chatbots. But in areas such as virtual friends or content creation, there are still no leaders. The market here is completely free, so the one who manages to enter first will win.
