ChatGPT Market Share Falls Below 50% As Gemini, Claude Gain Ground

It is the first time that OpenAI's ChatGPT has dipped below the 50% market share position in the global AI assistant market.

A report by Sensor Tower, 'State of AI 2026', says that ChatGPT remains the world's leading AI tool. It has more than 1.1 billion monthly active users. However, its market share dropped to 46.4% in May 2026. This is quite a big decrease from 52.8% last December and 65.3% two years ago in December 2024. So while it's still the dominant player, the AI landscape is getting a lot more crowded with the likes of Google Gemini and Claude by Anthropic.

Why Is ChatGPT Losing Market Share Despite Crossing 1 Billion Users?

The decline is not because ChatGPT’s userbase is shrinking. In fact, the platform continues to add users and recently crossed the one-billion monthly user milestone faster than any consumer platform in history. The shift is being driven by rivals growing even faster and attracting users for specialised use cases.

Google's Gemini now commands a 27.7% share of the AI assistant market with around 662 million monthly users, while Anthropic's Claude has climbed to 10.3% with nearly 245 million monthly users. Other players such as Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Meta AI each account for less than 5% of the market.

Sensor Tower reveals that users do not operate exclusively through one platform but rather multiple AI tools, i.e. users decide on various assistants based on features, capabilities, and specific tasks.

How Important Is India In The Global AI Race?

India is one of the biggest markets where ChatGPT has grown the most. In May 2026, the platform reported more than 330 million monthly users in India, which was up from 297 million in December 2025. While Gemini had a close figure of monthly users of about 229 million. The user base for Claude jumped to 72.3 million from only about 13.3 million five months ago.

The report also highlighted a sharp rise in AI engagement across India. Users are projected to spend 5.82 billion hours on generative AI applications during the first half of 2026, compared with 1.66 billion hours in the same period last year. Total sessions are expected to reach 168 billion, up from 47 billion a year earlier.

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However, monetisation is still a hurdle. According to forecasts, India, which is actually among the world's biggest users of AI, will only earn around US$38 million from AI app revenues in the first half of 2026, which is a very small part of the expected worldwide sum of US$4.25 billion.

Source:

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