OpenAI Says ChatGPT Has 100M Weekly Users in India, Signals Deeper Government Ties

OpenAI now estimates roughly 100 million weekly ChatGPT users in India, a figure CEO Sam Altman disclosed in the run-up to a high-profile AI summit. That scale places India immediately behind the U.S. in ChatGPT usage and reinforces the market’s strategic importance for product roadmaps, pricing experiments and government outreach.

Adoption in India is concentrated among students and younger cohorts, who are using ChatGPT for study help, exam preparation and classroom tasks. To accelerate uptake, OpenAI has introduced a locally priced ChatGPT tier (sub-$5) and temporarily offered extended cost-free access for Indian users, moves aimed at resolving price sensitivity and testing monetization pathways.

OpenAI is also expanding Delhi-based operations and exploring partnerships to tie its tools into education and public-service pilots, positioning India as both a growth engine and a policy laboratory. But converting broad engagement into sustained revenue will be constrained by infrastructure limits, billing friction and the country’s institutional procurement dynamics.

Competitors are adapting differently to India’s heterogeneous education system. Google, for example, has emphasized teacher-facing, configurable solutions that let school administrators and state authorities control feature use, reflecting the country’s state-driven curricula and the reality of shared devices and intermittent connectivity. That approach prioritizes lesson planning, assessments and classroom management so educators—not standalone student tutors—remain central to adoption.

These vendor strategies have practical implications: multimodal resources (video, audio, images and text) help bridge language barriers and low-bandwidth constraints, and large-scale teacher training programs and exam‑prep tools become critical levers for institutional uptake. The emphasis on administrative controls and local language support underscores that one-size-fits-all global products struggle in India’s decentralized system.

Policymakers and researchers are also raising pedagogical concerns. Overreliance on automated tools can blunt critical thinking and complicate assessment integrity, prompting calls for stronger teacher mediation, evaluation safeguards and curriculum-aligned deployments. By contrast, centralized models—such as China’s curriculum-integration approach—offer scale and coherence but pose different trade-offs around online safety and equitable access.

These competing dynamics mean the India AI summit will likely focus as much on governance, pedagogy and institutional design as on raw model performance. For OpenAI, success will depend on tailoring product features for administrative control, low-bandwidth contexts and teacher workflows, while demonstrating measurable public value in education and other public services.

The net effect is mixed: high engagement strengthens OpenAI’s negotiating position with partners and regulators and pressures rivals to match low-cost access strategies, but sustainable monetization will probably be incremental and mediated by public-sector procurement and education policy decisions.

• India weekly active users: ~100 million
• ChatGPT global weekly users (Oct 2025): ~800 million
• Local pricing move: sub-$5 ChatGPT tier, followed by a one-year free period for Indian users

As companies and governments debate trade-offs between rapid diffusion and pedagogical integrity, the pathway OpenAI chooses in India—balancing low-cost distribution, teacher-centered integrations and public partnerships—will shape competitor strategies and the architecture of AI deployment across other emerging markets.