ChatGPT’s Market Share Falls Below 50% for the First Time; the AI Assistant Market Enters an Intensely Competitive Landscape

According to Sensor Tower’s 2026 AI report, as of the end of May this year, ChatGPT’s share of the global AI assistant market fell below 50% for the first time since its launch in 2022, dropping to 46.4%, signaling that the AI assistant market has entered a landscape of intense competition.

Although ChatGPT still maintains a global leading position with 1.1 billion monthly active users, Google Gemini has risen rapidly to a 27.7% market share, and Anthropic’s Claude has also reached 10.3%, indicating that users’ willingness to switch among different AI assistants has significantly increased.

The report says that changes in the current market landscape are mainly driven by users’ orientations toward trust in AI assistants and value alignment, as well as the differentiated competitive strategies of different platforms—factors that are becoming key in influencing users’ choices.

Against this backdrop, the collaboration in February this year between OpenAI and the U.S. Department of Defense triggered a wave of user uninstalls, indirectly reflecting that users’ trust in platforms has become one of the core variables affecting their decisions.

Meanwhile, Claude from Anthropic—buoyed by its strong performance in productivity scenarios—is rapidly approaching ChatGPT in user retention rates, and is leading the industry with a 13% paid conversion rate.

At present, the overall market is still growing at a fast pace. In the first half of 2026, AI application downloads are expected to reach 2.3 billion times, and user spending is projected to exceed $4.2 billion, more than doubling the $1.83 billion in the same period last year;

However, there are signs that the overall growth rate trend has started to slow down, which may suggest that the market is shifting from a stage of simple, extensive user growth to a stage of deeper commercialization and more refined monetization.

In addition, due largely to the drag from the China and India markets, AI application downloads in Asia declined for the first time in 2026 Q1, falling by 3.3%.

Meanwhile, in-app purchase spending by users in North America and Europe has grown significantly, and this regional divergence will directly affect companies’ regional investment and deployment plans.

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