MUMBAI: The AI race is no longer a one-chatbot show. OpenAI’s ChatGPT has fallen below the 50 per cent mark in the global AI assistant market for the first time, even as it retains a commanding lead over rivals, according to Sensor Tower’s State of AI Report 2026.
The report found that ChatGPT accounted for 46.4 per cent of the global AI assistant market in May 2026, marking a notable shift in a category it once dominated. While the platform remains the world’s largest AI chatbot, competitors are steadily chipping away at its lead as users increasingly experiment with multiple AI assistants.
Despite the decline in market share, ChatGPT continues to operate at a scale few digital platforms have achieved. The chatbot crossed 1.1 billion monthly active users in May 2026, becoming the fastest mobile application to reach the one-billion-user milestone just three years after launch.
According to Sensor Tower, no major consumer app including TikTok, Youtube, Instagram or WhatsApp reached the landmark as quickly.
The strongest challenge is coming from Google’s Gemini, which captured 27.7 per cent of the market and built a user base of approximately 662 million monthly active users. Gemini’s growth has been fuelled by its deep integration across Google’s ecosystem, including Search, Gmail, Android and Workspace.
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude continued its rapid rise, securing 10.3 per cent market share and attracting around 245 million monthly users. In the United States, Claude’s share jumped from roughly 5 per cent in December 2025 to nearly 14 per cent by May 2026.
Claude has also emerged as the category’s monetisation leader. Around 13 per cent of its users subscribe to paid plans, while average monthly revenue per user climbed from less than $0.50 in September 2025 to $2.76 by May 2026.
The report suggests the AI assistant market is entering a new phase, where consumers no longer rely on a single platform. Instead, users are increasingly switching between services depending on their needs whether for search, coding, research, productivity or content creation.
That trend is helping smaller players gain traction. Platforms such as Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Meta AI each accounted for less than 5 per cent of the market but continued to expand their user bases, contributing to a more fragmented competitive landscape.
The broader AI economy is also growing at breakneck speed. Sensor Tower estimates AI app downloads will approach 2.3 billion during the first half of 2026, while consumer spending is expected to exceed $4.2 billion, more than double the $1.83 billion recorded a year earlier.
User engagement is accelerating too. Time spent on AI applications is projected to surge from 17.2 billion hours in the first half of 2025 to around 36 billion hours during the same period in 2026.
For now, ChatGPT remains the industry’s biggest player. But as rivals sharpen their strengths and users spread their attention across multiple platforms, the battle for AI dominance is beginning to look less like a monopoly and more like a marathon.