India has overtaken the United States as ChatGPT’s largest market by weekly active users, and OpenAI India managing director Prabhjeet Singh said its Indian user base has doubled since January 2026.

The milestone follows OpenAI’s report of more than 100 million weekly users in India in February 2026, when Sam Altman called it the company’s second-largest market and its largest for student users; an earlier estimate also put the Indian user base at 100 million.

OpenAI has not disclosed India’s current weekly user count, the U.S. figure, or India’s exact January baseline, and the ranking does not mean India is its largest market by revenue.

As adoption grows, users are putting ChatGPT to work across study, coding, content creation, communication, and everyday problem-solving rather than treating it as a novelty or using it only for simple queries.

Businesses are also moving AI projects from pilots into production, with JioHotstar and Cars24 cited as examples, while India is among Codex’s largest and fastest-growing markets, including in tier-II cities.

OpenAI is pursuing use beyond large companies and developers: traders and single-person shops use ChatGPT for tasks such as festive customer messages, marketing, and inventory support.

To reach more people, OpenAI is improving voice and support for Hindi and other Indian languages, while taking an Android-first approach that reflects the importance of smartphones as an internet gateway.

Its GPT-Live-1.1 update is designed to improve pronunciation, multilingual and mixed-language speech, and conversational flow, and adds 13 voices across seven languages, including the Hindi voices Neer and Leher.

OpenAI is also working to make its full model experience run on entry-level smartphones with limited memory, complementing the lower-cost ChatGPT Go plan.

The company says it is prioritizing wider access while expecting paid subscriptions to grow as users see more value; it is expanding ads on India’s Free and Go plans, saying they will support lower-cost access without influencing answers or giving advertisers access to personal information.

Through a partnership with Razorpay, Indian brands can use the Engage platform to prepare product catalogues, manage campaigns, and measure performance; early participants include Tanishq, Fastrack, Traya, Tata Neu, Shaadi.com, Axis Max Life, and NMIMS.

OpenAI expects to announce UPI and payment developments in the coming weeks; a 2025 pilot with NPCI and Razorpay enables purchases within ChatGPT using UPI Reserve Pay and UPI Circle, with Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank as banking partners and BigBasket among the initial merchants.