ChatGPT market share drops below 50% for the first time! Gemini approaches, Claude leads in paid usage

Analysis company Sensor Tower releases the 2026 AI Status Report, showing ChatGPT's market share has declined from over 50% in January to 46.4% at the end of May, with Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude rapidly catching up, marking the start of a multi-strong competition in AI assistants.
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• ChatGPT remains the most used AI assistant, but its moat is narrowing
• Cross-platform usage by users has become the norm
• Downloads and spending on AI applications double
• ChatGPT’s monetization strategy: shifting from subscriptions to advertising

Sensor Tower’s analysis report titled "2026 AI Status Report" indicates that OpenAI’s ChatGPT market share has fallen to 46.4% by the end of May, ending its dominance of over 50% since January this year. Google Gemini, with 27.7%, is rapidly closing in, and Anthropic Claude accounts for 10.3%, marking the market for AI assistants officially shifting from "one dominant player" to "three strong contenders."

This is the first time since its launch in early 2023 that ChatGPT has lost its absolute majority advantage in data.

ChatGPT remains the most used AI assistant, but its moat is narrowing

ChatGPT’s global monthly active users (MAU) exceed 1.1 billion, still the highest among all AI assistants. Close behind are Google Gemini (662 million) and Claude (245 million). However, the speed of market share change is more noteworthy than absolute numbers; from January to the end of May, just four months, ChatGPT’s share dropped from over 50% to 46.4%.

Sensor Tower data shows that other assistants like Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Meta AI combined hold less than 5% market share, indicating that the AI assistant market remains a highly concentrated oligopoly.

Users "cross-platform usage" has become the norm

An even more notable trend in the report is that users are increasingly willing to switch between different AI assistants. Certain events even accelerate this behavior. After OpenAI signed a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense in February this year, ChatGPT saw a 295% surge in uninstallation volume, demonstrating that brand trust and values are now as influential as the features themselves in user choices.

Google Gemini’s momentum comes from deep integration within the Google ecosystem, while Claude has built a good reputation in productivity use cases, with user retention gradually approaching ChatGPT’s. In the U.S. market, 13% of Anthropic users have converted to paid subscriptions, the highest conversion rate among the three major assistants.

AI application downloads and spending double

In the first half of 2026, global AI app downloads reached over 2.3 billion, with user spending exceeding $4.2 billion, a significant increase from $1.83 billion in the same period in 2025. However, both download and spending growth rates are slowing, indicating a market approaching maturity, according to Sensor Tower.

Regionally, Asia experienced a 3.3% decline in downloads in Q1 2026 (mainly due to China and India), but still led the world in total downloads. However, Asia’s in-app purchase spending lags behind North America and Europe, which will influence where major AI companies decide to invest in paid features.

ChatGPT’s monetization strategy: shifting from subscriptions to advertising

OpenAI has been testing advertising features in ChatGPT since February, and by May, an average of 17% of daily active users saw ads. The largest categories of ads are currently software and shopping, followed by media entertainment and dining. As ChatGPT deepens shopping integration, referral traffic is shifting from Amazon to Target, Walmart, and Costco, because Amazon has blocked ChatGPT’s web crawler.

This also creates opportunities for other platforms. Walmart’s built-in AI assistant Spark helps consumers find products, and although Amazon’s Rufus user growth has stagnated, consumers using Rufus spend longer within the app and have higher conversion rates, demonstrating the tangible impact of embedded AI on shopping behavior.