ChatGPT Falls Below 50% Market Share as Claude Beats It on Revenue Per User

Since Sensor Tower's 2026 State of AI Report landed on June 16, the headline number for OpenAI is clear: ChatGPT held more than 80% global market share in March 2024, then above 50% through January 2026, and by the end of May it had slipped to 46.4%.

ChatGPT has 1.1 billion monthly active users and became the fastest app ever to cross 1 billion, according to Sensor Tower. OpenAI last reported 900 million weekly active users in February. No other AI product is remotely close in raw reach. The competitive pressure is real and accelerating.

Who Is Gaining

Google's Gemini now sits at 27.7% market share with 662 million monthly users, according to Sensor Tower. Its growth is mostly structural: Gemini is baked into Google's broader product ecosystem, which gives it a distribution advantage no independent AI lab can match. Forbes reported that Gemini is the fastest-growing AI assistant in key markets including the U.S., Canada, most of the EU, Japan, and South Korea.

Anthropic's Claude has 245 million monthly users and 10.3% market share. Claude's reputation for productivity tasks and handling complex text has driven that growth, per Sensor Tower. Forbes noted that Claude's global share jumped from 5.1% in February to 10% in April, a spike directly tied to a wave of ChatGPT uninstalls after OpenAI signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. ChatGPT uninstalls peaked at 202% above normal in the second week of March, according to the Forbes report.

Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI each hold less than 5% share individually.

Monetization

Market share is one metric. Revenue per user is another, and Claude wins that comparison by a significant margin.

Sensor Tower data, reported by Forbes, shows Claude earns $2.76 per user on iOS compared to ChatGPT's $1.74. Claude's paid subscription conversion rate on iOS is 13% versus ChatGPT's 8%. Users who choose Claude appear more willing to pay for it.

On user retention, ChatGPT still leads with an 86% retention rate for new monthly sign-ups, per Forbes. Claude's retention has climbed to 73.7% and is narrowing the gap.

The broader market is monetizing faster too. In the first half of 2026, users are on pace to spend $4.2 billion on AI apps, up from $1.83 billion in H1 2025, according to Sensor Tower. Download and spending growth rates are decelerating in percentage terms even as absolute numbers climb, which Sensor Tower interprets as a market shifting from growth mode toward maturity.

The Enterprise Cost Problem

On the enterprise side, a separate pressure is building that could reshape the competitive picture entirely.

Wired reported this week that corporate AI token costs have become a boardroom-level problem. Royal Bank of Canada's CEO disclosed token usage surged 500% over six months. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said on an earnings call that token usage at his company is "pretty, pretty crazy." Box CEO Aaron Levie called token budgeting "one of the most important" and "heated" internal topics. Roughly 300 companies mentioned AI tokens during earnings calls in April and May 2026, up from 93 in the same period a year ago, per Wired's review of AlphaStreet transcripts.

That cost pressure matters because enterprise contracts are where the real money lives. If companies start routing lower-complexity prompts to cheaper models or cap employee usage, the per-user revenue figures for all platforms could compress. The 8x8 case that Wired profiled, where the company estimates $5 million in annual software savings against a Claude bill "well below" that figure, is the optimistic scenario. Whether that math holds as usage scales is the question companies are now actively wrestling with.

What OpenAI Is Doing About It

OpenAI began running ads in ChatGPT in February and by May was showing them to 17% of daily users on average, according to Sensor Tower data cited by Zamin.uz. The leading advertiser categories are software and tech, online shopping, media and entertainment, and food services. That's a notable strategic shift for a company that built its brand on a clean product experience.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that OpenAI is also considering significant price cuts for enterprise AI tools to compete with Anthropic. Forbes noted that Google has already moved, cutting its cheapest Gemini AI Plus plan from $8 per month to $5 per month earlier this month.

The unresolved question heading into the second half of 2026: whether Claude's superior monetization rate reflects a genuinely more engaged, higher-value user base, or whether it's a temporary artifact of a smaller, more self-selected early adopter pool that will erode as Anthropic scales. Sensor Tower's data doesn't yet answer that.