OpenAI has crossed a major milestone, saying more than 1 billion people and 2 million businesses now use its AI models as it cuts prices to bring more customers on board.
The tech giant announced the figures July 31, less than four years after ChatGPT debuted, alongside the company’s broader strategy for making AI more affordable through lower pricing and improved infrastructure efficiency.
“Our models now reach more than one billion active users and more than two million businesses. As people gain confidence in the technology, they use it more deeply,” OpenAI said in a blog post.
The company also said usage increases over time, noting that six months after joining, users send about 50% more messages each day and use ChatGPT for about twice as many types of work. OpenAI added that agentic work through Codex now accounts for 99.8% of its weekly output tokens across the company.
The user count spans OpenAI’s consumer and enterprise products, including ChatGPT, Codex, and ChatGPT Work.
Price cuts aim to expand adoption
The milestone comes just days after OpenAI reduced prices for two GPT-5.6 models.
The company lowered GPT-5.6 Luna pricing by 80% and GPT-5.6 Terra by 20%, saying engineering improvements reduced serving costs and increased efficiency. Luna now costs $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, while Terra costs $2 and $12, respectively. Pricing for GPT-5.6 Sol remains unchanged.
“When the cost of useful intelligence falls, more work becomes worth doing,” OpenAI said. “As adoption grows, we gain the revenue, real-world feedback, and visibility into demand to keep investing in the next generation of research and infrastructure.”
OpenAI said internal work with GPT-5.6 Sol helped reduce end-to-end serving costs by 20% and improve token-generation efficiency by more than 15%. The company also reported that improvements in context management and retained reasoning boosted GPT-5.6 Sol’s score on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark from 13.3% to 38.3% while using six times fewer output tokens.
More must-read AI coverage
- SS&C Intralinks DealCentre AI vs. Datasite: Which platform is built for the future of dealmaking?
- SS&C Intralinks FundCentre AI vs. Juniper Square: Which platform better supports modern private markets fund managers?
- Why Data, Not Models, Determines AI Success
- The Rise of the AI-Native Factory: How Physical AI Is Transforming Manufacturing
Competition is reshaping the AI market
The announcement comes as OpenAI faces growing pressure from rivals, particularly Anthropic, while enterprises become more cautious about AI spending.
The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had been weighing price reductions for weeks as competition intensified and customers pushed back against rising AI costs. The publication also reported that CEO Sam Altman had acknowledged earlier this year that pricing had become an increasing concern for customers.
Open-source AI models, including several from China, have also added pressure by offering lower-cost alternatives for businesses and developers.
Bigger reach, tougher economics
Reaching 1 billion active users underscores how quickly AI tools have become mainstream, but it also highlights the balancing act facing AI providers.
Lower prices could help OpenAI attract more developers and enterprise customers while encouraging existing users to build more AI-powered applications. At the same time, cheaper services may squeeze profit margins as the company continues investing billions of dollars in new models and computing infrastructure, a challenge that is becoming common across the AI industry.
For businesses, the trend suggests advanced AI is becoming more affordable and accessible. For OpenAI, however, sustained growth will depend on whether greater usage can offset the enormous costs of building and operating increasingly powerful AI systems.
Also read: Meta’s AI development shows how Mark Zuckerberg is presenting faster app creation as an early return on AI spending, even though Meta has not disclosed measured productivity gains.