ChatGPT’s Growth Is Stalling, and That’s a Problem for OpenAI’s IPO Plans

ChatGPT isn’t the unstoppable juggernaut it was a year ago. New data from Sensor Tower shows the app is losing users faster than it’s gaining them — and the trend is accelerating.

In April, uninstalls of ChatGPT jumped 132% year over year. That’s bad enough, but March was worse: a staggering 413% increase in uninstalls compared to the same month in 2025. The trigger? OpenAI’s February deal with the Pentagon. A lot of users apparently decided that was a line they didn’t want to cross.

Now, before you say “but the user base is still growing” — yes, technically. But the growth rate is cratering. ChatGPT added monthly active users at 168% in January. By April, that number had fallen to 78%. That’s still growth, but the trajectory is unmistakable. When your growth rate halves in four months, you’re not in a healthy place.

Sensor Tower notes that ChatGPT still has a “substantially larger user base” than most competitors, but that’s cold comfort when the momentum is clearly shifting. The question isn’t whether ChatGPT is big — it’s whether it can stay big.

This matters beyond the usual tech media drama. OpenAI is reportedly eyeing an IPO, and investors love growth stories. A company that’s plateauing — or worse, shrinking — before going public is a tough sell. The narrative around AI has shifted from “this changes everything” to “this is useful, but I’m not paying for it.”

I think the Pentagon deal is a bigger factor than most analysts admit. A lot of early ChatGPT users were privacy-conscious tech enthusiasts, academics, or creatives. Handing the keys to the military doesn’t sit well with that crowd. It’s one thing to know your data is being used to train a model; it’s another to know it might end up in a defense contract.

Competition isn’t helping either. Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and a dozen open-source models are eating into ChatGPT’s mindshare. When every chatbot can do roughly the same thing, brand loyalty only goes so far. Users will jump for a better experience, a cheaper price, or just because they don’t like the politics.

OpenAI needs to figure out its identity fast. Is it a consumer product, an enterprise tool, or a defense contractor? Trying to be all three is pulling the user base in different directions. The IPO clock is ticking, and the numbers aren’t getting better.