Three years ago, ChatGPT’s mobile app had 40 million monthly active users. Today, it has more than 1 billion. That kind of growth doesn’t happen to many products in tech history, and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar is making sure nobody forgets it.
Friar highlighted the company’s trajectory in a January 2026 blog post, crediting better computing infrastructure, improving AI models, and a user base that has clearly decided ChatGPT is no longer a novelty but a daily habit. The mobile milestone, confirmed by third-party analytics firm Sensor Tower, makes ChatGPT the fastest app ever to reach 1 billion monthly active users.
The numbers that matter
By February 2026, the app had crossed 900 million weekly active users. Revenue has tracked alongside the user growth. OpenAI’s annualized recurring revenue sat at $2 billion in 2023. By 2025, it had cleared $20 billion. By August 2026, the run rate hit $40 billion.
The composition of that revenue is shifting in ways that matter for the long-term business case. Enterprise revenue surpassed consumer subscription income ahead of schedule, with July 2026 showing 32% month-over-month growth in enterprise. OpenAI offers consumer subscriptions, team and enterprise plans, and API access for developers building on top of its models.
Why the enterprise flip matters
The competitive pressure is real. Anthropic’s Claude recorded approximately 640% year-over-year monthly active user growth in Q2 2026, reaching around 56 million MAUs.
What to watch from here
The $40 billion run rate puts OpenAI in a rarefied tier of software companies by revenue scale, but run rates are forward-looking by definition. They tell you what the trajectory implies, not what has actually landed in the bank.