India is now ChatGPT's largest market by weekly users, OpenAI's India MD says

What changed

India has become ChatGPT's largest market globally by weekly active users, with the local user base doubling since January 2026, OpenAI India managing director Prabhjeet Singh said in interviews reported on 3 November 2026 by The Economic Times, Inc42 and Elets CIO. The milestone moves India up from second place. During an earlier India visit, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman had described the country as the company's fastest-growing market and its second-largest by users. In February 2026, OpenAI said India already had more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users.

Singh, who joined OpenAI as India managing director earlier in 2026 and spoke in his first media interviews since taking the role, linked the jump to how people use the product day to day. "In less than a year, it's doubling. It just gives you a sense of how people are beginning to find relevance and deep use cases," he told The Economic Times, as quoted by Elets CIO.

Voice, Hindi and cheaper phones

Many Indian users go straight to the dictation button instead of typing, according to coverage of Singh's remarks. That habit is pushing OpenAI to invest in voice, Hindi and other Indian languages. "Most of India actually doesn't use English as a primary. So real big focus is on Hindi and vernacular," he told The Times of India, as reported by Elets CIO. The same report notes work this year on Hindi voices such as Neer and Leher, and an effort to run the full model experience on entry-level Android phones with limited memory, alongside the lower-priced ChatGPT Go plan that OpenAI earlier offered free for a year to Indian users.

Inc42, citing the same ET interview, says OpenAI expects announcements on UPI and payments in the coming weeks, and has partnered with Razorpay so Indian brands can advertise on ChatGPT. Early participating brands named in that report include Tanishq, Fastrack, Traya, Tata Neu, Rivaah by Tanishq, Shaadi.com, Axis Max Life, Palmonas and NMIMS. Singh said advertisers would not get users' personal information and that ads would not change ChatGPT's answers, according to Inc42.

From pilots to production

On the enterprise side, Singh said OpenAI is seeing a shift from early pilots and demos to scaled, production deployments, naming JioHotstar and Cars24 as examples in the Inc42 account. India is also among Codex's largest and fastest-growing markets, with meaningful developer use from tier-II cities, he added. OpenAI opened its first India office in Delhi NCR and began local hiring in August 2025. At the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026 it outlined Mumbai and Bengaluru offices and an OpenAI for India programme.

For data residency, Inc42 reports a partnership with TCS' HyperVault data centre business that starts at 100 megawatts and could scale to 1 gigawatt, plus availability of OpenAI models through Amazon Bedrock for inference kept inside India. Privacy, security and return on investment remain the main adoption hurdles Singh flagged for businesses.

Safety and what could still go wrong

As concern grows over misuse of more autonomous AI agents, Singh said OpenAI is talking to government agencies, banks and other enterprises about cybersecurity and critical infrastructure, and that clear AI regulation would help build confidence. He did not name the agencies or the exact models in the Elets account. The same coverage notes he backed constructive regulation for consumers, enterprises and developers.

The headline claim rests on OpenAI's own weekly active user ranking as relayed by its India MD. Independent public tallies of ChatGPT's country-by-country weekly users were not published alongside the interviews, so the ranking cannot be checked against a third-party dashboard. What is clearer from the reporting is the product bet: voice and Indian languages for the mass market, UPI for payments, local compute for enterprises, and advertising to keep free and low-cost access running. Those bets will decide whether India's lead as ChatGPT's biggest market holds once growth slows from easy consumer uptake to harder paid and enterprise revenue.