OpenAI tops 400 million users despite DeepSeek’s emergence
Brad Lightcap of OpenAI.
Courtesy: OpenAI
OpenAI appears to be growing quickly despite increasing competition.
The San Francisco-based tech company had 400 million weekly active users as of February, up 33% from 300 million in December, the company’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, told CNBC. These numbers have not been previously reported.
Lightcap pointed to the “natural progression” of ChatGPT as it becomes more useful and familiar to a broader group of people.
“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it,” Lightcap said in an interview, adding that it takes time for individuals to find use cases that resonate. “There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”
OpenAI is seeing that spill over to its growing enterprise business. The company now has 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, said Lightcap, pointing out that often employees will use ChatGPT personally and suggest to their companies that they implement the tool.
“We get a lot of benefits, and a tail wind from the organic consumer adoption where people already have familiarity with the product,” he said. “There’s really healthy growth, on a different curve.”
Developer traffic has also doubled in the past six months, quintupling for the company’s “reasoning” model o3, according to Lightcap. Developers use OpenAI to integrate the technology into their own applications. OpenAI counts Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna and T-Mobile among some of its largest enterprise customers.
Lightcap likened this usage to cloud services, which Amazon Web Services pioneered two decades ago. While the consumer business may grow faster since people can adopt it at will, enterprise is in the “process of building up,” he said.
“There’s a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business,” Lightcap said. “AI is going to be like cloud services. It’s going to be something that you can’t run a business that ultimately is not really running on these very powerful models underneath the surface.”
The DeepSeek effect
OpenAI’s growth comes amid new competition from Chinese competitor DeepSeek, which roiled tech markets in January as investors feared it would hamper future profitability of U.S. artificial intelligence companies and their dominance. Megacap tech companies were hit especially hard. Nvidia lost 17% on the Monday DeepSeek made waves, wiping off almost $600 billion in market value.
Later that week, OpenAI accused DeepSeek of improperly harvesting its models in a technique known as distillation. Lightcap said the new competition hasn’t changed the way OpenAI thinks about open source, their product road map or mega-spending plans.
“DeepSeek is a testament to how much AI is like entered the public consciousness in the mainstream — it would have been unfathomable two years ago,” he said. “It’s a moment that shows how powerful these models are and how much people really care.”
Besides DeepSeek’s emergence, OpenAI has also been dealing with a tense time on the legal front.
Billionaire Elon Musk, a company co-founder, has sued OpenAI for breach of contract as it attempts to convert into a for-profit. Microsoft has poured billions into the company while SoftBank is close to finalizing a $40 billion investment that could value the company at close to $300 billion, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Musk and a group of investors bid to buy the nonprofit’s assets for $97.4 billion earlier this month. In a letter to Musk’s attorney, OpenAI’s lawyer said the company’s board determined that Musk’s “much-publicized ‘bid’ is in fact not a bid at all.” OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor said in a statement that the company “is not for sale.”
“The numbers tell the story,” Lightcap said. “We try to be very transparent about where we stand on all of this. (Musk) is a competitor. He’s competing. It’s an unorthodox way of competing.”
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, holds hundred dollar bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 Conference at Miami Beach Convention Center on April 7, 2022 in Miami, Florida.
Marco Bello | Getty Images
The Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange Bullish filed for an IPO on Friday, the latest digital asset firm to head for the public market.
The company, led by CEO Tom Farley, a veteran of the finance industry and former president of the New York Stock Exchange, said it plans to trade on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “BLSH.”
A spinout of Block.one, Bullish started with an initial investment from backers including Thiel’s Founders Fund and Thiel Capital, along with Nomura, Mike Novogratz and others. Bullish acquired crypto news site CoinDesk in 2023.
“In the first quarter of 2025, Bullish exchange executed over $2.5 billion in average daily volume, ranking in the top five exchanges by spot volume for Bitcoin and Ether,” the company said on its website. The prospectus listed top competitors as Binance, Coinbase and Kraken.
The IPO filing says that as of March 31, the total trading volume since launch has exceeded $1.25 trillion.
The filing is another significant step for the cryptocurrency industry, which has fought for years to convince institutions to embrace digital assets as legitimate investments.
It’s already been a big year on the market for crypto offerings, highlighted by stablecoin issuer Circle, which has jumped more than sevenfold since its IPO in June. Etoro, an online trading platform that includes services for crypto investors, debuted in May.
Novogratz‘s crypto firm Galaxy Digital started trading on the Nasdaq in May, moving its listing from the Toronto Stock Exchange. And in June, Gemini, the cryptocurrency exchange and custodian founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, confidentially filed for an IPO in the U.S.
Meanwhile, investors continue to flock to bitcoin. The digital currency is trading at over $117,000, up from about $94,000 at the start of the year.
President Donald Trump, on Friday, signed the GENIUS Act into law — a set of regulations that establish some initial consumer protections around stablecoins, which are tied to assets like the U.S. dollar with the intent of reducing price volatility associated with many cryptocurrencies.
In its filing with the SEC, Bullish says its mission is partly to “drive the adoption of stablecoins, digital assets, and blockchain technology.”
Crypto industry players, including Thiel, Elon Musk, and President Trump’s AI and Crypto czar David Sacks spent heavily to re-elect Trump and have pushed for legislation that legitimizes digital assets and exchanges.
WATCH: Trump’s crypto plan
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