India has 100M weekly active ChatGPT users, Sam Altman says

India now has 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, positioning the country as one of OpenAI’s biggest markets worldwide, CEO Sam Altman said ahead of a government-backed AI summit.

On Sunday, Altman detailed ChatGPT’s growing traction in India in an article published in the Indian English daily Times of India, as OpenAI prepares to formally take part in the five-day India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi starting Monday. Altman is expected to attend alongside senior leaders from several of the world’s top AI companies.

The momentum arrives as OpenAI — like other major AI players — looks to India’s young demographic and its more than a billion internet users as a powerful engine for global expansion. OpenAI opened an office in New Delhi in August 2025 after months of groundwork in the country, and it has tailored its approach for India’s highly price-sensitive market. That includes launching a sub-$5 ChatGPT Go plan, which was later made free for one year for users in India.

In the Times of India piece, Altman said India is now ChatGPT’s second-largest user base after the United States, underscoring the country’s growing importance in OpenAI’s global strategy. The disclosure also comes as ChatGPT’s worldwide usage has accelerated, with the platform hitting 800 million weekly active users by October 2025 and reportedly nearing 900 million.

Altman also cited students as a major driver of adoption, noting that India has the highest number of student users of ChatGPT worldwide.

More broadly, Indian students have become a crucial growth segment for leading AI firms as competitors compete to embed their products into classrooms and everyday learning routines. Google has also been targeting the market, offering Indian students a free one-year subscription to its AI Pro plan in September 2025. Separately, India represents the highest global usage of Gemini for learning, according to Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager for education, who commented last month.

“With its focus on access, practical AI literacy, and the infrastructure that supports widespread adoption, India is well positioned to broaden who benefits from the technology and to help shape how democratic AI is adopted at scale,” Altman wrote.

ChatGPT’s rapid growth also highlights a broader challenge for AI companies operating in India: translating mass adoption into a durable economic impact. Indian government initiatives, such as the IndiaAI Mission — a national effort to expand compute capacity, support startups, and accelerate AI adoption in public services — are intended to close those gaps. But the country’s price-sensitive environment and infrastructure limitations have made monetisation and large-scale deployment more difficult than in many developed markets.

“Given India’s size, it also risks forfeiting a vital opportunity to advance democratic AI in emerging markets around the world,” Altman wrote, warning that uneven access and adoption could concentrate AI’s economic benefits in too few hands.

Altman also indicated that OpenAI intends to deepen engagement with the Indian government, stating that the company will soon announce new partnerships to expand AI access nationwide. He did not share specifics, but said the effort would prioritise widening reach and helping more people apply AI tools in practical ways.

The India AI Impact Summit is expected to attract a broad mix of global technology and political leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and prominent Indian business figures such as Mukesh Ambani and Nandan Nilekani. Political leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, are also expected to attend, underscoring India’s push to position itself as a central player in global AI discussions.

For global AI companies, including OpenAI, the summit underscores how India’s massive user base is translating into greater influence on how the technology is developed and adopted at scale.