San Francisco-based tech company OpenAI is witnessing rapid expansion, with its user base growing despite intensifying competition in the artificial intelligence sector.
According to Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, OpenAI had 400 million weekly active users as of February 2025, reflecting a 33% increase from 300 million in December.
Lightcap attributed this surge in adoption to the natural progression of ChatGPT as more people discover its utility through word of mouth.
“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it,” he said, emphasising that users often take time to identify valuable use cases.
OpenAI’s growth isn’t limited to individual users—its enterprise business is also booming, with 2 million paying enterprise users, double the number recorded in September.
Lightcap noted that many professionals who use ChatGPT personally are advocating for its adoption within their companies.
“We get a lot of benefits and a tailwind from organic consumer adoption where people already have familiarity with the product,” he explained, adding that enterprise adoption is growing on a different curve.
In addition to enterprise clients, developer traffic on OpenAI’s platform has doubled in the past six months, while usage of its reasoning model O3 has quintupled.
Developers integrate OpenAI’s technology into their applications, with major enterprise clients including Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna, and T-Mobile.
Lightcap compared OpenAI’s current trajectory to the rise of cloud services, pioneered by Amazon Web Services two decades ago.
“AI is going to be like cloud services. Eventually, businesses will be unable to operate without these powerful models running behind the scenes,” he stated, predicting widespread AI integration in the corporate sector.
