Competition snatches "hegemony" of artificial intelligence from ChatGPT

BarcelonaIn December 2025, Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI, sent a "red alert" to all his employees. After years of dominating the narrative of artificial intelligence at the user level, the creator of ChatGPT saw how the competition, for the first time, began to overtake him. The relaunch of Gemini, Google's competitor to its flagship product, was perceived as an existential threat. Just three months later, Anthropic, founded by engineers originally from his own company, launched Claude Code –dedicated to programmers– and Claude CoWork –for all professional tools–, two applications that have made "a quantum leap" for both consumer and corporate AI, assures the founder and general director of WeArtificial, Aleix Valls.

In just a handful of weeks, the reality of the artificial intelligence market has been turned upside down, and the original disruptor seems to be among the losers of the change. According to UPF-BSM professor Alexandra Arbós, alternatives to ChatGPT have launched more specialized products than the original, and with that they have torn apart the brand dominance that the former held. "Loyalty with ChatGPT is breaking," observes the expert.

The fall of "AI for everything"

According to industry figures, grouped by major measurement players such as specialized agencies First Page Sage or Similarweb, ChatGPT remains the main driver of commercial AI. However, it has significantly reduced its market share: if in 2023 it was the only relevant player, and at the beginning of 2025 it accounted for 87% of AI searches, its current penetration oscillates between 60% and 67%, about 20 points less in just one year. Gemini, for its part, has climbed to 15%, while Copilot, Microsoft's product, operates 12.5% of operations. Claude, more vertical, remains at 5%.

According to data from the three companies, ChatGPT falls to fourth position among generative AI platforms, with 4% more users during the first quarter. On the contrary, its two closest competitors are growing much more strongly: since January, according to company communications, users of Anthropic's models have grown by 14%, while those of Google have climbed by 12%. Copilot lags behind its competitors, jumping only 3%.

OpenAI, in the opinion of the founder of the specialized consulting firm AthenaCore, Josep Curto, "is the company that has the most to lose, and the one that has seen the most users leave for other platforms". Arbós agrees, pointing to the change in trend in user loyalty. "ChatGPT was the AI for everything, but Google and Anthropic have found their market niches, and they are eating into the ground it had gained," he observes.

The "quantum leap" that wasn't made

According to the experts consulted, the origin of ChatGPT's loss of ground is multifaceted. Firstly, Gemini's gains have a lot to do with Google's dominant position in the digital world: "Gemini has been integrated into Google's work suite, and everyone who was already working there has made the switch and eliminated ChatGPT licenses," explains Valls. Anthropic, for its part, has represented a "paradigm shift" in what an AI tool means. "It has gone from being a chat to much more than that: to emulating user behavior in the application," points out the founder.

Anthropic's tool "learns to do tasks and reproduces them," going far beyond receiving orders and executing them, as the traditional chatbot model does. As with Gemini, OpenAI has already tried to emulate this step forward, with proposals like ChatGPT Agent and Codex, which were already in operation before Claude's big leap, but which now occupy a central place in Altman's strategy.

However, Arbós believes that OpenAI's path to regaining dominance in the segment is rocky. If during 2025 Gemini and Claude found it impossible to compete with their predecessor's market dominance, now it is ChatGPT that has to make a dent in an already established market, such as that of agents for programmers. "Codex is very powerful, but now ClaudeCode is the benchmark for professionals," observes the professor.

Without a clear business

Experts also indicate that ChatGPT's competitors have learned from Altman's original sins in terms of business. As Curto recalls, OpenAI "was born as a non-profit laboratory," and has become a business project over the years. Anthropic's founders, siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, "always thought about building a company," which has accelerated the business perspective, as evidenced by agreements to integrate Claude with platforms as relevant as Adobe, which did not have its own AI assistant; or the understanding with Google, which amounts to 200 billion dollars.

With this more planned business line, Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in annual revenue, and already accounts for 30 billion dollars in turnover for 2026, about 5 billion more than the competitor calculates. In Vall's opinion, ChatGPT is still "a very powerful product" in B2C channels, that is, for the end user, and "one day it will have to make the decision to dedicate itself entirely to it." The original chatbot, the expert opines, "must give up fighting on all fronts and focus on what it dominates."