For the first time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has lost its dominant share of the artificial intelligence assistant market. According to a Sensor Tower report, although ChatGPT remains the leading AI assistant, it now holds a plurality rather than a majority of users.
At the start of the year, ChatGPT had over 50% market share, but by late May, it had dropped to a record low of 46.4%. This decline follows a tough period for OpenAI’s reputation.
In March, the company signed a contract with the Pentagon, prompting backlash from some users and sparking a grassroots boycott called “QuitGPT,” which claims millions of supporters.
At the same time, OpenAI redirected its internal focus from consumer-oriented creative projects to enterprise and productivity solutions, leading to the discontinuation of its video-generation app, Sora.
The integration of ads into ChatGPT earlier this year also affected user sentiment. Meanwhile, competitors have taken advantage of these changes. Anthropic has positioned itself as a more ethically driven alternative, resulting in a notable increase in its enterprise client base and revenue.
While Anthropic’s Claude still holds a modest 10.3% market share, a Reuters analysis of Sensor Tower data shows that its monthly active user growth surged 640% year-over-year, far outpacing ChatGPT’s 62% growth rate.
Currently, the broader AI assistant market is more divided. Google’s Gemini has firmed its position as the primary challenger to OpenAI, capturing 27.7% of the market.
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The rest of the industry is highly fragmented, with smaller competitors and alternative platforms like xAI’s Grok, Perplexity, Meta AI, and DeepSeek grouped into an “other” category that accounts for about 5% of market share.