ChatGPT's global market share drops below 50% for the first time

According to the latest 2026 AI Status Report from Sensor Tower, ChatGPT remains the world's most popular AI assistant, but its global market share has dropped below 50% for the first time, falling to 46.4%. The report shows ChatGPT has over 1.1 billion monthly active users, making it the fastest app to hit that milestone, but its lead is being challenged by Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude.

Gemini ranks second with 662 million monthly active users and a 27.7% market share, while Claude has 245 million users and a 10.3% share. Other AI assistants like xAI Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI each hold less than 5% of the market. Users are increasingly switching between multiple AI products, causing ChatGPT's share to drop from over 50% before January.

Sensor Tower estimates that in the first half of 2026, AI app downloads will reach nearly 2.3 billion, with user spending exceeding $4.2 billion, up from $1.83 billion in the same period in 2025. AI assistant usage time is expected to grow from 17.2 billion hours to about 36 billion hours, with the top three assistants accounting for 89% of total usage. In the US, users are more focused on productivity tasks, and Claude leads the industry with a 13% paid conversion rate, a key metric for investors evaluating AI companies' revenue sustainability.