How many people use AI?

Growth

Steady, not exponential.

Since 2025, roughly 40 to 77 million more people a month have become weekly AI users. Steady additions on a bigger and bigger base mean the growth rate is slowing: the classic S-curve.

The data

Month by month.

Every snapshot in the chart, newest first. Numbers are people who use generative AI at least weekly; each person counts once, at their most involved use. Click a month to see it in the chart.

Download the data: ai-adoption.csv. Free to use under CC BY 4.0 with a link back to this page.

The method

How we estimate serious users.

The serious-users view zooms in on the 1.77 billion people who use AI every week, so each of the 2,500 dots is about 708,000 people. Each person counts once, at their most serious use: a $100+ plan (violet), then coding with AI (red), then paying (gold), then using AI about an hour a day for free (deep green). Everyone else who uses AI weekly is pale green, the same people who are green in the whole-world view. The scale stays the same for every month: in earlier months, the people who hadn’t become weekly users yet are faint dots, so as the timeline plays every color grows and nothing shrinks. As of Oct 2026 that’s about 182 million serious users.

Paying and coding

These are the same estimates as in the whole-world view: payers are anchored on OpenAI’s 50M+ consumer subscribers plus an estimate for the others, and coders are built tool by tool (see below). About 30% of coders are assumed to pay personally; they’re shown in red, not gold.

$100+ Max and Pro plans

OpenAI launched the first $200-a-month plan, ChatGPT Pro, in December 2024; Anthropic followed with Claude Max ($100 and $200) in April 2025, and Google, xAI and others added their own. No company publishes how many people are on these plans, so we estimate from what is public:

• ChatGPT Pro. If 1–3% of OpenAI’s 50M+ consumer subscribers are on Pro, that’s about 0.5–1.5 million people.
• Claude Max. Claude Code alone passed a $2.5 billion revenue run rate in February 2026, much of it from businesses. If a few hundred million dollars a year comes from personal Max plans at an average of about $150 a month, that’s a few hundred thousand people.
• Everyone else (Google AI Ultra, SuperGrok Heavy, Perplexity Max): a few hundred thousand more.

Together that’s roughly 1–2.5 million in early 2026 and an estimated 1.5-4M as of Oct 2026, growing as these plans spread. We assume about 60% of them code with AI. This is the chart’s widest estimate; if any company publishes a count, we’ll use it.

About an hour a day

No AI company publishes how long people use it each day. The best public anchor is Pew Research (February 2026, 5,119 U.S. adults): 24% of U.S. adults use AI chatbots daily, 12% several times a day, and 4% “almost constantly”. We read “almost constantly” as roughly an hour a day or more. That’s about 10 million Americans: about one in twelve U.S. adults who use chatbots at all, and closer to one in ten of those who use them weekly.

Americans use AI at work and pay for it more than most of the world, so we assume the world’s share is about half the U.S. one: 4.5% of weekly users (range 3–6%), or about 80 million people (~53–106 million). We assume 40% of them also pay or code, so deep green shows the rest. With only one survey, we hold that share steady over time; earlier months are probably a little high.

What we don’t know

• “Almost constantly” isn’t a stopwatch. It’s how people describe themselves in a survey. Some use AI less than an hour; some much more.
• One country’s survey stands in for the world. Heavy use is surely higher in some places (Chinese students, Indian developers) and lower in others.
• Plan counts are inferred, not reported. If OpenAI, Anthropic or Google share how many people are on their top plans, the violet dots will change.

The method

How we estimate the red dots.

The red dots are people who use AI tools to write software, free or paid: code assistants like GitHub Copilot, coding agents like Claude Code and Codex, AI code editors like Cursor, and app builders like Lovable, where you describe an app and AI writes it. No one publishes a single count of these people, so this is an estimate, and we want you to see exactly how we made it. As of Oct 2026 we put it at about 42 million people (range 31-53M).

1. What each tool has made public

Here is the latest public number for each tool, and our estimate of how many people use it in a typical month. Companies count users in different ways, so we say which kind of number each one is.

2. Adding it up without counting people twice

The rows add up to about 32–73 million. But most people who code with AI use more than one tool: in one 2026 survey, 70% of developers used two to four. Someone who uses Claude Code at home and Copilot at work is one person and should be one dot. Dividing by about 1.3 tools per person brings the total to roughly 25–56 million, with the middle near 40 million.

3. Checking it a second way

Start from developers instead of tools. There are about 48 million software developers in the world (SlashData). Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey found 78.5% use AI tools at least monthly, and JetBrains found 85% use them regularly. That gives:

• 48 million × 78.5% ≈ 38 million
• 48 million × 85% ≈ 41 million

Add the few million non-programmers building apps with tools like Lovable (80% of its builders say they aren’t technical) and you land in the low to mid 40 millions. Two separate methods meeting in the same place is why we’re comfortable with about 40 million, give or take 10.

4. Going back in time

For earlier months we used the dated numbers we have and drew a smooth line between them: GitHub Copilot’s first million paying users (late 2023) and 15 million total users (spring 2025), Cursor passing a million daily users (2025), Claude Code’s revenue run rate growing from $1 billion (Dec 2025) to $2.5 billion (Feb 2026), and Codex going from 1 million monthly users (Feb 2026) to more than 5 million weekly (Jun 2026). Nov 2022 and Jan 2023 show coding as “not tracked”: Copilot already had users then, but the chart’s count starts with ChatGPT.

5. What we don’t know

• Claude Code has never published a user count. Its row leans on revenue and a survey. If Anthropic shares a number, we’ll use it.
• “Users ever” is not “users now.” Copilot’s 50 million and Replit’s 50 million count sign-ups over years. We turn them into monthly users with assumptions, stated in the table.
• Surveys lean toward keen developers. People who answer developer surveys use AI more than average, which is why we treat survey-based figures as upper bounds.
• Red and gold overlap. Many of these people also pay for ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Each person sits in one color, so we move an estimated 30% of coders out of gold and count them only in red.

Found a better number, or think we read one wrong? Tell us. This chart has already been corrected by readers, and we’re glad of it.

The method

How this chart is made.

The world is 8.1 billion people, drawn as 2,500 dots, so each dot is about 3.2 million people. Every person counts once, at their most involved AI use: doesn’t use AI weekly (gray), uses it weekly for free (green), pays for a subscription (gold), or codes with AI (red). The chart follows the design of Damian Player’s viral chart from February 2026; its Feb 2026 total still matches his 1.3 billion.

Every month is an estimate, built from public reporting. Green starts from ChatGPT’s published weekly users and adds weekly users of other AI apps, above all in China, where ChatGPT isn’t available. Gold starts from OpenAI’s subscriber disclosures. Red is built tool by tool. Microsoft’s AI diffusion reports, which measure working-age people spending 90+ minutes a month in AI apps from anonymized Windows telemetry, give a stricter check. Companies count users in different ways, so paid and coding are shown as ranges. We add a month as new numbers come out.

What to keep in mind

• Weekly use is the line we draw. Count monthly users and you get about 2.1 billion; count everyone who has ever tried AI and you get about 3 billion. Microsoft’s stricter measure (90+ minutes a month, people aged 15–64) gives about 1.0 billion, though it leaves out some of China’s biggest AI apps, such as Doubao, which Microsoft says it will add in its next report. Weekly sits in between, and it’s the best sign of a habit.
• ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion does most of the work. The rest (about 0.5 billion) is our estimate of weekly users of other apps who don’t use ChatGPT, mostly in China. That part is the least certain.
• The red dots are an estimate. No one counts everyone who codes with AI, so we built the number tool by tool and checked it against developer surveys. Every step is shown above.
• Only OpenAI publishes subscriber numbers. Gold adds estimates for Google, Anthropic and others, which is why its range is wide. Payers who also code are shown in red (we assume about 30% of coders pay personally), so gold is a bit smaller than the “Pays for AI” number in the legend.

Checking ourselves

An estimate is only worth something if it can be wrong. So before each new outside number comes out, we write down what our numbers say it should show, and come back to it here.

• October 5, 2026, about Microsoft’s next AI diffusion report (Q3 2026). We expect: 20.5–23% of people aged 15–64 worldwide (Q2 was 18.8%), and China above 22% (Q2 was 17.5%). Microsoft says that report will add AI apps it has been missing, mostly Chinese ones. Our weekly count puts roughly 300 million weekly AI users in China, about 30% of its 15–64 population, so adding those apps should lift China several points and the world about one point, on top of about a point of ordinary growth. If the world figure comes in under 20.5%, or China barely moves, our China estimate is too high and we’ll lower it. Waiting for the report.

Changes to this chart

• October 5, 2026. In the serious-users view, each dot is now the same number of people in every month (about 708,000, today’s weekly users ÷ 2,500), and the people who hadn’t yet become weekly users show as faint dots. Before, each month’s weekly users filled the whole grid, so a dot stood for fewer people in early months, and coders seemed to shrink in 2024 when only their share of a fast-growing crowd dipped. Now every color only grows as the timeline plays.
• October 5, 2026. Added Water and electricity, in proportion, after readers (and a friend, by email) asked what all this AI use costs. It compares data centers with farms, lawns and golf courses, and says plainly where the concerns are real.
• October 5, 2026. Checked Microsoft’s numbers against its own reports. The percentages were right (16.3% in H2 2025, 17.8% in Q1 2026, 18.8% in Q2 2026, of people aged 15–64), but in people they come to about 1.0 billion, not “1.0–1.2 billion” as we had it. Also noted that Microsoft’s count leaves out some of China’s biggest AI apps, which it plans to add.
• October 5, 2026. The chart now opens on serious users, at readers’ request: people on $100–200 Max and Pro plans, people who code with AI, people who pay, and people who use AI about an hour a day. That view zooms in on the 1.77 billion weekly users, so each dot is about 700,000 people. The Max/Pro and hour-a-day numbers are new estimates with wide ranges; here’s how we made them. The whole-world view is one tap away.
• September 30, 2026. Green now means people who use AI every week, about 1.7 billion, not “ever used AI.” The old number mixed Microsoft’s strict count of regular users with a label that said “ever used,” and readers rightly pointed out that ChatGPT alone reports 1.2 billion weekly users. Every month was rebuilt from ChatGPT’s weekly numbers plus other apps, and the looser (monthly, ever tried) and stricter (Microsoft) counts are shown in the text. The headline is now “about 79% don’t use AI weekly” rather than “80% have never used AI.”
• September 30, 2026. Gold rebuilt from OpenAI’s subscriber disclosures (50M+ consumer subscribers in Feb 2026) plus estimates for other companies: about 100 million people pay, up from the 40 million shown before. Payers who also code with AI now sit only in red.
• September 29, 2026. Red dots rebuilt. They had counted mainly Codex and Copilot (about 10 million people); they now estimate everyone using AI coding tools, free or paid, including Claude Code, Cursor and app builders like Lovable (about 40 million). Every month was redone the same way. Readers on r/dataisbeautiful spotted the gap.
• September 29, 2026. Corrected how Microsoft measures AI use: from anonymized telemetry of people spending 90+ minutes a month in AI apps, not a survey. Thanks to the reader who read the methods paper.
• September 29, 2026. Added the People online view, the new-people-per-month bars, playback timed to real months, and answers to the questions readers asked most.

Sources

• Damian Player's original “each dot” chart (Feb 2026) — The design and the Feb 2026 snapshot this chart reproduces
• Microsoft AI Economy Institute: Global AI Adoption in 2025 (H2 2025 report) — 16.3% of working-age people used generative AI in H2 2025 — the Feb 2026 anchor
• Microsoft AI Economy Institute: Global AI Diffusion in Q1 2026 — 17.8% of working-age people in Q1 2026
• Microsoft On the Issues: The continued state of global AI diffusion in 2026 (Sep 21, 2026) — 18.8% of working-age people in Q2 2026
• Microsoft AI for Good Lab: AI diffusion report data (GitHub) — Country-level data behind the Microsoft reports
• Microsoft Research: Measuring AI Diffusion, a population-normalized metric (technical report, arXiv 2511.02781) — How Microsoft measures it: anonymized Windows telemetry scaled up for phones, 19 AI sites and apps, 90+ minutes a month, people aged 15-64
• TechCrunch: ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users (Feb 27, 2026) — ChatGPT weekly users and OpenAI's 50M paying subscribers
• Google: The Gemini app hits 1 billion monthly users (Aug 2026) — Gemini's 1B monthly users
• Latent Space: Codex usage up 10x in 6 months to 7M users (Jul 14, 2026) — Coding-tool growth
• ITU Facts and Figures 2025: Internet use — 6 billion people online in 2025 (74%), 5.8 billion in 2024: the base for the People online view
• Microsoft FY26 Q4 earnings (Jul 29, 2026) — GitHub Copilot: 50 million users
• OpenAI Newsroom (Jun 2, 2026) — Codex: more than 5 million weekly active users
• Anthropic: Series G announcement (Feb 12, 2026) — Claude Code: $2.5B+ run-rate revenue; weekly users doubled since Jan 1
• JetBrains Research: AI coding agent adoption in 2026 (Aug 2026) — Share of professional developers using Claude Code, Copilot, Codex, Cursor at work
• SlashData: global developer population (2025) — About 47 to 48 million developers worldwide
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025: AI — 78.5% of developers use AI tools at least monthly
• Pragmatic Engineer: AI tooling in 2026 — 70% of developers use two to four AI tools (overlap)
• Replit: $400M raise (Mar 11, 2026) — Replit: over 50 million users
• The Decoder: ChatGPT now reaches 1.2 billion people every week (Sep 29, 2026) — ChatGPT: more than 1.2 billion weekly users (OpenAI, DevDay)
• TechCrunch: Google's Gemini app surges to 1 billion users (Aug 11, 2026) — Gemini app: 1 billion monthly users
• TechNode: QuestMobile, China's AI-native apps reach 499 million monthly users (Jul 14, 2026) — China: 499M deduplicated monthly users of AI apps (May 2026)
• Menlo Ventures: 2026 State of Consumer AI (Sep 16, 2026) — About 2.0 billion AI users worldwide; consumer AI spending
• Pew Research Center: Americans and AI 2026 (Jun 17, 2026) — 49% of US adults use AI chatbots
• Reuters Institute: Generative AI and News Report 2025 — 61% have ever used generative AI, 34% weekly, across six countries
• Yahoo/CNET on OpenAI's 'Scaling AI for everyone' (Feb 2026) — OpenAI: 50M+ consumer subscribers, 9M business subscribers
• The Information: ChatGPT subscribers nearly tripled to 15.5 million in 2024 — ChatGPT paid subscribers: 5.8M end of 2023, 15.5M end of 2024
• Microsoft AI Diffusion Report, Q2 2026 (PDF) — 18.8% of working-age people; the stricter check
• Sundar Pichai on X: AI Overviews pass 2 billion monthly users (Jul 23, 2025) — Google AI Overviews: 2B+ monthly users (people who saw AI answers in Search)
• CNBC: Zuckerberg says Meta AI has 1 billion monthly active users (May 28, 2025) — Meta AI: 1B monthly users across Meta's apps
• Pew Research Center: Americans and AI 2026, full report (PDF, Jun 17, 2026) — 24% of US adults use AI chatbots daily, 12% several times a day, 4% almost constantly: the anchor for the hour-a-day estimate
• OpenAI: Introducing ChatGPT Pro (Dec 5, 2024) — The first $200-a-month AI plan; Max/Pro users start here
• TechCrunch: Anthropic rolls out a $200-per-month Claude subscription (Apr 9, 2025) — Claude Max ($100 and $200 plans)

The cost

Water and electricity, in proportion.

The question that follows “how many people use AI?” is what all that use costs. Two things are true at once. Nationally, data centers use far less water than farms, lawns or golf courses. Locally, one data center can take a big share of a town’s water, and data centers are already raising some power bills. Here is the scale, and where the real concerns are.

Water used in the U.S. each year, in billions of gallons

Not quite apples to apples: the farm number is water withdrawn, and some of it returns to rivers and aquifers; the others are mostly water used up (evaporated or soaked into the ground). The data-center numbers cover all computing, from email and video to AI, which is the fastest-growing part.

One question to AI

Google measured its Gemini app in 2025: the median text prompt uses about 0.26 milliliters of water, about five drops, and 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, about what a TV uses in nine seconds. That counts water at the data center, not at the power plant. Ten prompts a day for a year comes to about one liter. One average American shower is about 17 gallons, roughly 65 liters (EPA). Long tasks, images, video and coding agents use much more than a single text prompt, and companies don’t publish those numbers yet.

Electricity

Data centers used about 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and could use 6.7–12% by 2028 (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for the Department of Energy). Worldwide they used about 1.5% in 2024, heading toward about 3% by 2030, with AI as the main reason for the growth (International Energy Agency). That growth is concentrated in a few places, mostly the U.S. and China.

Where the concerns are real

• Small towns, big users. In The Dalles, Oregon, Google’s data centers used 29% of the city’s water in 2021. The public only learned that after the city lost a fight to keep the number secret.
• Power bills. On the grid that serves 13 states and D.C., including Virginia, the independent market monitor found that data center demand added $23.1 billion to costs over three capacity auctions, paid by customers through their rates (March 2026).
• Dry places. A data center cooled with water matters far more in Arizona than in Oregon. Where it’s built, and whether it uses recycled water or air cooling, makes a bigger difference than how many prompts anyone types.
• Growth. On-site water use could double or quadruple by 2028. The numbers above are a snapshot of a fast-moving target.

And drinking water?

About 2.1 billion people, 1 in 4, still lack safely managed drinking water (WHO and UNICEF, 2025). That is one of the most important problems in the world. It is mostly a problem of pipes, treatment and money where people live, not of water being used up by computers far away. The two meet in places where data centers are built in regions already short of water, which is why where they’re built matters so much.

What I do about it

When a reader asked me about this by email, here is part of what I wrote back:

“I’m particularly passionate about ownership. I believe we should own our data and I’m trying to bring things under my roof as much as possible, my own server, my own website, my own AI. That way I can control things like my power (choosing renewable), which companies I’m supporting and more.”

“All that to say, I’m trying very hard to focus on the things that I can actually control.”

We’re building this answer up over time and will add to it as better numbers come out. Sources:

• USGS: Estimated use of water in the United States in 2015
• EPA WaterSense: Outdoors
• GCSAA: Golf courses reduce water usage by 31 percent (Dec 30, 2025)
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report (for the U.S. Department of Energy)
• Google: Measuring the environmental impact of AI inference (Aug 2025)
• IEA: Energy and AI, energy demand from AI (2025)
• Data Center Dynamics: Google’s water use in The Dalles, Oregon, after the city dropped its lawsuit against The Oregonian
• Utility Dive: PJM’s market monitor on data centers and capacity costs (Mar 13, 2026)
• WHO/UNICEF: 1 in 4 people globally still lack access to safe drinking water (Aug 26, 2025)