OpenAI says its AI agents surpass 10 million users

OpenAI's AI agent products have crossed 10 million active users, fueled by the launch of ChatGPT Work on July 9 and the integration of its Codex coding agent into a unified desktop application, according to reporting from The New Stack and other outlets tracking the company's growth trajectory.

Rapid Acceleration After GPT-5.6 Launch

The milestone reflects explosive growth since OpenAI released its GPT-5.6 model family and debuted ChatGPT Work — a new agentic mode designed for longer, multi-step tasks that can research and analyze information across more than 1,400 connected apps and files. Unlike traditional chatbot interactions, ChatGPT Work takes a goal rather than a prompt, breaks it into steps, and works autonomously for hours, producing finished spreadsheets, slides, documents, and web applications.enterprisedna+2

Codex alone grew from fewer than 1 million weekly users in February to 5 million by early June, then surged past 8 million by mid-July after GPT-5.6 launched and Codex was folded into the ChatGPT desktop app. The combined active user base of Codex and ChatGPT Work has continued climbing since.techjacksolutions+4

Non-Developers Adopt Faster Than Engineers

One of the more striking trends is who is driving growth. Non-developers — analysts, marketers, designers, and other knowledge workers — now account for roughly 20% of Codex's user base and are adopting the tool three times faster than engineers, according to OpenAI and reporting from The Next Web. An OpenAI-backed research paper published in June with Columbia, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania found that "the most rapid increase [in agentic AI usage] is occurring outside the initial audience of software developers".theregister+2

Within OpenAI itself, 97.9% of employees now use Codex, including non-technical departments such as Legal and Recruiting, up from about 40% in August 2025.theregister

Brockman's Promotional Push

Co-founder Greg Brockman announced a promotional campaign on X offering $100 in API credits to the first 10,000 users who tweet about ChatGPT Work. "Tweet what you love about ChatGPT Work, claim $100 in free credits, get more work done," Brockman wrote, echoing a similar promotion the company ran previously for GPT-5.6.facebook+3

The campaign represents a roughly $1 million marketing spend designed to generate organic buzz around the new product, arriving as OpenAI faces intensifying competition from Anthropic's Claude Code and Google's Alphabet Inc. ↘ 3.58% Gemini Spark, which launched its own macOS agent in early July.usecarly