OpenAI hits 1B users, 2M businesses as GPT-5.6 prices drop

OpenAI has crossed a major milestone, reporting that its models now reach more than 1 billion active users and 2 million businesses across consumer and enterprise products like ChatGPT, Codex, and ChatGPT Work. The figures, announced July 31, come less than four years after ChatGPT launched, highlighting how quickly AI has gone mainstream. According to OpenAI, engagement deepens over time: users send about 50% more messages daily and use ChatGPT for twice as many work types just six months after joining. Notably, agentic workflows through Codex now generate a staggering 99.8% of the company's weekly output tokens, signaling a shift toward AI agents that take action rather than just answer questions.

The milestone arrives alongside aggressive price reductions for its GPT-5.6 family. OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna pricing by 80% to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, while GPT-5.6 Terra dropped 20% to $2 and $12, respectively. These cuts were enabled by engineering improvements that reduced serving costs and boosted efficiency. Internal work with GPT-5.6 Sol also cut end-to-end serving costs by 20% and improved token-generation efficiency by 15%, while raising its ARC-AGI-3 benchmark score from 13.3% to 38.3% using six times fewer output tokens. The move comes as OpenAI faces intensifying competition from Anthropic and low-cost open-source models, particularly from China, with CEO Sam Altman acknowledging pricing concerns earlier this year. For enterprises, cheaper intelligence lowers the barrier to building AI-powered applications, but OpenAI must balance affordability against the massive infrastructure investments needed to sustain growth.