ChatGPT now controls less than 50% of the AI assistant market

ChatGPT, the most popular AI assistant in the world, is beginning to lose traction. According to Sensor Tower’s State of AI Report 2026, cited by TechCrunch, ChatGPT’s market share fell below 50% for the first time, standing at 46.4% at the end of May. In second place is Google’s Gemini with 27.7% share and Anthropic’s Claude with 10.3%. Other AI assistants such as Grok, Perplexity, DeepSeek and Meta AI altogether are under 5%.

Sensor Tower estimates that ChatGPT exceeds 1.1 billion monthly users, ahead of Gemini with 662 million, and Claude with 245 million. The report also points out that users are more willing to migrate between different AI assistants based on factors such as brand trust. OpenAI's February partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense, for instance, led to a notable surge in app uninstalls — a clear signal that users care about a company's values and whom it chooses to work with, not just the quality of its product.

For its part, Gemini is gaining more followers thanks to its integration into several Google products, while Claude is building a solid reputation in productivity tasks. Furthermore, Sensor Tower estimates that during the first half of 2026, AI applications reached nearly 2.3 billion downloads and more than 4.2 billion dollars in user spending. Nevertheless, the AI assistant market appears to be reaching a stage of maturity, since these figures are now starting to drop.