Between January 2025 and January 2026, ChatGPT has lost almost 24 points of market share among daily users of its mobile app in the United States, its main market. Gemini has gone from 14.7% to 25.1%. Grok, from 1.6% to 15.2%.
In web traffic the pattern repeats itself. ChatGPT rose 50%, from 3.8 billion to 5.7 billion views. Gemini jumped 647%, from 267 million to 2 billion. OpenAI is still the leader, but it already has a real alternative in all aspects.
Why is it important. When you lose 24 share points while the market grows 152%, something has broken along the way. And it’s not just technical leadership. It’s the narrative.
Sam Altman sold OpenAI as the company that would reach the market first AGI. That promise mobilized a lot of capital, a lot of talent and a lot of faith. The AGI has not arrived yet. Meanwhile, OpenAI has had to become something else: a conglomerate that does quite a bit more, from chatbots to chips to a wearables.
The business model problem. OpenAI…
- It earned $13 billion in 2025. It lost $12 billion in the last quarter alone.
- It has 40 million paying subscribers at $20 a month. There are 800 million monthly. It is still insufficient.
The company needs AI to function as a business service, not just a consumer product. But there he is losing to Anthropic, which leads with 32% of the business market compared to 25% for OpenAI. Claude Code has become the favorite option for developers: 42% share compared to 21%.
Google has 20% and counting. Meta controls 9% with Flame. DeepSeek barely 1%, but its model shows that the level of OpenAI can be replicated without the same resources.
The great advantage of Google. Google doesn’t need you Gemini earn money tomorrow. It can afford low prices and red numbers for a long time, while perfecting the technology and integrating it into products that already work: the search engine, YouTube, Android, Chrome… OpenAI depends on ChatGPT to survive. The snowball in debt and payment commitments is too big.
Sundar Pichai’s strategy is clear: not to place advertising on Gemini to maintain trust, but to try placing ads on the AI-powered search engine, where users see them as something to be expected. Google can learn without risking its brand.
Yes, but. Altman has reacted with quite aggressive diversification. OpenAI no longer wants to be just a modeling company, but rather control multiple layers: from hardware to consumer applications.
The objective is become too big to fall. That a hypothetical failure represents a systemic risk for the US economy, as happened with the banks in 2008.
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behind the scenes. The dispersion is becoming noticeable. Banking is reducing its dependence on OpenAI. 18 months ago, half of AI use cases at large banks used OpenAI models. By the end of 2025, that figure had fallen to a third.
While OpenAI loses focus, Anthropic wins them. Projects to be profitable in 2028. OpenAI, having moved the goal along the wayin 2029.
Featured image | Xataka
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was originally published in
Xataka
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Javier Lacort
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