Despite increasing competition in the artificial intelligence chatbot market, OpenAI (OPENAI) CEO Sam Altman told employees ChatGPT is back to experiencing 10%-plus monthly growth, according to CNBC.
Altman informed OpenAI’s employees of the gains in an internal Slack message on Friday, the report said. The message also indicated OpenAI plans to release an updated Chat model sometime this week and that Codex, its AI coding tool, has grown by about 50% over the past week.
It is estimated that ChatGPT has about 800M weekly active users.
The growth update from Altman occurred two days before Super Bowl LX, which featured ads from Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI and its chief rival, the Amazon-backed (AMZN) Anthropic (ANTHRO), which creates the Claude series of AI models. Anthropic ran an ad during the iconic U.S. sporting event critiquing OpenAI’s decision to begin using ads in ChatGPT. OpenAI’s ad focused on its Codex product. The game was expected to have nearly 130M viewers. OpenAI is slated to start testing ads in ChatGPT today.
“I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it,” Altman said in a post on X.
“More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don’t show you ads.),” he added. “Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions.”
Last week OpenAI launched GPT-5.3-Codex, while Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6. Both companies are also reportedly involved in funding rounds. Anthropic’s latest could send it to a valuation of $350B. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s valuation could soar above $800B.