Sam Altman says India now has 100 million weekly ChatGPT users

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said India now accounts for around 100 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, highlighting the country as one of the company’s most important markets. In a column ahead of the India AI Impact Summit, Altman said this number positions India as the chatbot's second-largest user base after the United States.

This is the first explicit India-specific user counts shared by the company, which has largely shared global metrics since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022.

The CEO said the 100 million figure captures weekly active users of ChatGPT in India, spanning both the free and paid tiers with high adoption among students, developers, small businesses and enterprises.


Referring to the government's IndiaAI Mission, he said it is designed to expand compute capacity, support startups and accelerate multilingual applications in healthcare, agriculture and public services to ensure AI becomes "an essential tool for hundreds of millions of people across India".

"India, the world's largest democracy, has all the ingredients to be a full-stack AI leader: optimism about what AI can do for the country, homegrown tech talent, and a national strategy for how to incorporate the technology more widely," he wrote.

Altman pointed to a three-fold strategy for the outreach of AI's benefits: access, adoption, and agency.

"Access is the admission ticket; without it, people and institutions cannot participate fully in the AI era. Adoption is putting AI to work in classrooms, workplaces, and public services. Agency is what turns access and adoption into impact by giving people the ability and confidence to use AI to learn faster, build more, and make better decisions," he said.

Warning against uneven gains, Altman said, "If AI access and adoption are uneven, AI's upside will be uneven, too", and added that a "capability overhang" risks concentrating productivity and economic gains if left unaddressed. He also added that OpenAI recently brought together more than 200 nonprofit leaders across four Indian cities to help them use ChatGPT.

OpenAI has been engaging with the Indian market heavily in a year of aggressive expansion. It opened an office in New Delhi last year and has been working with local partners and policymakers on AI adoption, safety and regulation. The company also rolled out India-focussed pricing, including a cheaper “ChatGPT Go” plan and promotional offers.

Altman will be delivering a keynote at the India AI Impact Summit on February 19.