ChatGPT: One Billion Served, Amid AI Concerns

InnovationAIChatGPT: One Billion Served, Amid AI ConcernsByJohn Werner,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I am an MIT Senior Fellow & Lecturer, 5x-founder & VC investing in AIFollow AuthorJun 12, 2026, 11:29am EDTOpen AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during Snowflake Summit 2025 at Moscone Center Getty ImagesIt took less than a week for the newly available ChatGPT technology to get a million monthly active users (MAU) in November of 2022, making it the most quickly adopted technology at that time. Now, according to analyst firm Sensor Tower, OpenAI has hit the one billion mark, even though if you listen to people on the street, you might hear a lot of negative things about AI.In terms of sentiment, some point to recent commencements at American universities, where attendees moaned and groaned about the AI revolution, and surveys where people say they deliberately don’t use AI at work, for ethical reasons. You might also hear a lot about rug pulls, job displacement, and, thanks to the very public kerfuffle between Anthropic and DoD, fully autonomous lethal weapons.So why is GPT now getting McDonalds numbers?Flying BusinessOne reason for the enduring popularity of LLMs might be business applications. In 2025, OpenAI reported that its lineup had hit a million business customers, with over 800 million personal users. That’s weekly, not monthly.“We’re proud to work with category leaders in industries like financial services, healthcare, retail, and more, where our technology is making intelligence central to their customer experiences, internal operations, and team-level workflows,” spokespersons wrote, at the time, around the three-year mark, as they celebrated this milestone.MORE FOR YOUThat’s one reason why AI continues to snowball even as many people want to fight its incursions into their lives. But it’s just one aspect of a disconnect that you might say comes from the old saying “do as I say, not as I do.”The Limited P...