OpenAI: ChatGPT audience grew sharply among users aged 35+ in early 2026

OpenAI has registered a sharp expansion of ChatGPT's audience in the first quarter of 2026. The service continues to grow rapidly, but now it is used more actively not only by early enthusiasts, but by a broader mass audience — in terms of age, gender, and geography.

Who Came to ChatGPT

The main shift in Q1 2026 is acceleration among users older than 35. Users younger than 35 still generate the largest share of messages, but the more mature audience in this quarter increased its share faster. This is an important signal: the product is ceasing to be a tool mainly for students, tech workers, and early adopters, and is becoming a familiar service for a broader everyday audience.

Another marker of mass transition is gender balance. Users with names that OpenAI classifies as typically female continued to increase their share in ChatGPT usage after last year's distribution approached parity. Now they account for more than half of users for whom such an assessment can be made. This is not a complete picture of the entire audience, but the trend shows that the service is becoming less skewed toward a typically technical male base.

New Growth Markets

Growth is evident not only in the largest and most mature markets. OpenAI compares countries by the number of messages per capita and tracks how their positions change from quarter to quarter. In the first quarter of 2026, the fastest rises in the rankings were driven by markets outside the usual core.

Countries from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia-Pacific, and Africa particularly stood out.

• Dominican Republic rose from 53rd to 44th place
• Haiti — from 91st to 82nd
• Japan — from 43rd to 35th
• Mexico — from 60th to 54th
• Brazil — from 47th to 42nd

Importantly, this is not a list of countries with the largest absolute traffic. The focus is specifically on where ChatGPT was gaining relative usage density faster. The same list includes Tanzania, Costa Rica, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, and Austria.

In other words, growth is increasingly less dependent on a few super-large markets and increasingly distributed across regions where the product is becoming part of everyday digital routine.

How Work Is Changing

OpenAI separately examined work scenarios within consumer plans — Free, Go, Plus, and Pro. There is an important limitation here: the analysis does not include Codex, enterprise, and educational products, so real-world AI application is broader than these figures show. But even among consumer accounts, it is clear that ChatGPT is increasingly used not episodically, but for recurring tasks.

Text and visual content creation still leads, but its share declines over time as interest grows in more specialized scenarios. The fastest-growing work tasks have become content preparation, health-related documentation, as well as information search and extraction.

The balance between work and non-work usage on personal accounts has remained broadly consistent with previous quarters, but the work scenarios themselves have become more stable and regular.

• Text and visual preparation remains the largest use case
• Specialized tasks are growing faster than general ones
• Health-related documentation scenarios are intensifying
• Personal accounts are increasingly serving recurring work needs

What This Means

Q1 2026 shows that ChatGPT is going through the next stage of maturation: from a product for curious and advanced users to a mass tool with sustainable scenarios. For the market, this means two things simultaneously: new users are coming from a broader demographic, and existing ones are beginning to embed the service into regular work.

When these two processes happen in parallel, a platform typically becomes established not as an experiment, but as a basic digital layer.