Sam Altman says ‘10% of the world now uses our systems a lot’ as Studio Ghibli-style AI images help boost OpenAI signups
- OpenAI’s user base is expanding rapidly, with CEO Sam Altman suggesting that one in 10 people globally now use its systems. The company has seen a significant boost from its new image-generation feature that went viral for its ability to simulate the artwork of Hayao Miyazaki.
OpenAI's user base is rapidly on the rise, according to CEO Sam Altman. In an interview with TED late last week, Altman said ChatGPT's user base was "growing very rapidly" and suggested that the company's user base had doubled in a mere few weeks.
In February, OpenAI's weekly active users surged past 400 million while its paying business users also crossed 2 million, according to a company spokesperson. The startup had 300 million weekly active users in December, highlighting how rapidly the company has been growing in the last few months.
Now, Altman says that “something like 10% of the world uses our systems a lot" — putting the number of users at approximately 800 million.
The fresh disclosure about OpenAI's user base appeared to be inadvertently revealed by Altman. When TED's Chris Anderson stated that the OpenAI CEO had told him backstage that the company's user base had doubled in mere weeks, Altman claimed that the statement had been made “privately."
Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation from Fortune, made outside of normal working hours.
OpenAI's record-breaking growth
ChatGPT made history after its initial launch as the chatbot became the fastest-growing app in the history of web applications, reaching 100 million monthly active users just two months after it was released.
A flurry of new releases from OpenAI appears to have catapulted the company ahead of some of its rivals. For example, Google Gemini recorded 284.1 million total visits in February 2025, according to a recent analysis of web traffic.
The company saw a significant boost from its new image-generation feature that went viral for its ability to simulate the artwork of Hayao Miyazaki.
Altman said signups for ChatGPT hit 1 million in an hour following the launch of the new feature. Signups for the chatbot were coming so fast and furious that at one point, the system was having trouble keeping up with what Altman called “biblical demand.”
Altman was quizzed on AI ethics
Altman was pressed on AI safety, transparency, and corporate accountability during a pointed and occasionally tense conversation with TED's Anderson.
The CEO was asked about copyright issues around training modules on artistic work, something that has plagued OpenAI since before the company launched ChatGPT. Many artists have taken issue with AI image generators, arguing that vast datasets used to train models contain copyrighted works without explicit permission from creators. OpenAI is in the middle of fighting several copyright lawsuits on the issue.
During the interview, Altman appeared to float the idea of revenue-sharing with living artists for the first time.
"I think it would be cool to figure out a new model where if you say I want to do it in the name of this artist and they opt-in, there's a revenue model there that's okay," he said.
The accusations of IP theft by major AI companies have been reignited by the viral Ghibli-style images being generated on ChatGPT. Studio Ghibli’s co-founder, Miyazaki, is still a working artist and one who has taken issue with AI in the past, famously calling the tech an “insult to life itself” in a 2016 documentary.
OpenAI said in its system card for 4o image generation it had “added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist," but users are still able to imitate the studio's style via the paid-for version of that chatbot.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
