ChatGPT sees sharp drop in Korean users in May

Open AI CEO Sam Altman takes part in a Kakao press conference to discuss their strategic partnership during a press conference in Seoul, Feb. 4. Korea Times photo by Shim Hyun-chul

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is losing steam in Korea, with its user numbers reporting a sharp decline in May, data showed Thursday.

According to data from market tracker IGAWorks, ChatGPT reported 10.17 million monthly active users (MAUs) last month, a drop of more than 500,000 from a month earlier. This is the second time that the figure has declined in Korea since February 2024.

Given the consistently strong use of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot service, the latest decline suggests that it has entered a phase of growth slowdown in the Korean market.

The service showed a solid growth pattern for the past few months. The MAU for ChatGPT topped five million for the first time in March, and the figure doubled the following month to more than 10 million.

This boom was due to the viral popularity of an image-generation feature in OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o. The service transforms ordinary user photos into the distinctive artistic style of Studio Ghibli animations.

However, the latest fall in its MAU shows the boom came to an end. In May, the number of new downloads for ChatGPT displayed a sharp decline from the previous month. The downloads in May only reached 1.5 million, less than a third of April's downloads, when the number came in at 4.66 million.

According to data from the Korea Information Society Development Institute, the number of internet users subscribing to paid AI services accounted for seven percent of total users in 2024, a surge of over seven times more than the previous year.

OpenAI recently made public its plan to open its first Korean office in Seoul within the next few months and start its business here soon.

On Wednesday, Jason Kwon, chief strategy officer at OpenAI, celebrated the inauguration of President Lee Jae-myung in a post on X and expressed his support for the AI policy drive of the new administration.