“Unstoppable?” ChatGPT Surges to 700 million Weekly Users as Rivals Race to Compete

Whether you like AI or not, 2025 really feels like the year it’s gone mainstream. Chatbots are becoming integral to work, study, and daily life for hundreds of millions of people.

It’s reached the point where people I’d never have expected to use AI now casually say, “I’ll just ChatGPT it,” replacing the once-default, “I’ll Google it.” Some even use AI assistants for emotional support, with ChatGPT leading the charge, with criticisms of how overly friendly and sycophantic its GPT-4o model can feel.

Beyond personal use, these tools are now embedded in business and government. What we’re seeing is no longer just technological innovation, but a race to see which AI assistant can scale the fastest, integrate the deepest, and stay ahead of the curve.

ChatGPT’s is dominating the space with no signs of slowing down

ChatGPT is on track to hit 700 million weekly active users in August 2025, up from 500 million in March, marking a 4x year-over-year increase.

On average, users spend 16 minutes a day on the app, with an estimated 2.5 to 3 billion prompts sent daily.

Even more impressive, ChatGPT now drives around 60% of all AI-related web traffic, a clear sign of its dominance in the space.

All of this comes as OpenAI is preparing to release ChatGPT-5, with a possible launch set for Thursday, August 7, 2025.

The release follows recent remarks from Sam Altman, who admitted feeling unsettled by its creation, bluntly asking, “What have we done?”

Claude, Gemini and Grok are gaining ground

Claude’s Anthropic model is estimated to have 300 million monthly active users as of Q1 2025, marking a 70% increase since the same quarter in 2024. It’s gaining ground through enterprise integrations, with partners like Slack and Notion helping to expand its reach.

Its enterprise market share has grown from 18% in 2024 to 29% in 2025, positioning Claude as ChatGPT’s closest competitor in the business-to-business space.

Another tool making noise is Grok, which surged in usage following the release of Grok 3. Daily users jumped by five times, and web traffic soared from 600,000 to 4.5 million visits per day.

While Grok isn’t yet competing with Claude or ChatGPT in scale, it has carved out a solid foothold with 35 to 39 million monthly active users, thanks in large part to its integration with Twitter (X).

Closer to the top, Google’s Gemini has quietly reached massive adoption. It jumped from 350 million monthly active users in March 2025 to 450 million by July 2025, with daily active users rising from 9 million in October 2024 to 35 million over 6 months, marking a 4x increase.

The AI race is far from over and isn’t going anywhere

ChatGPT is leading the race for now, with ChatGPT-5 launching imminently. OpenAI is aiming to expand its lead even further.

Another important thing with these AI models is the context windows, with Claude Sonnet 4 supporting 200K tokens, compared to GPT-4o’s 128K. Even more impressive is Gemini’s 1 million tokens with its 2.5 Pro model. Tokens determine how much information a model can handle at once; this is known as the context window (The larger the tokens, the better).

Despite context windows being an important factor, at this point, it also feels like trust, usability, and speed are becoming just as important as raw model quality. OpenAI itself faced recent backlash after accidentally exposing shared chat logs to Google search indexing, making me feel like security and privacy may soon be what tips users toward other platforms.

AI adoption is accelerating across nearly every sector. Personally, I find open-source models like Meta’s llama or Qwen the most exciting.

Local deployment is still limited by device power for most people, myself included, but the potential of running a powerful model on personal hardware is an appealing prospect and one I’m following very closely.