A year of ChatGPT Go: 100 million users, but can OpenAI make money in India?

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT Go in India on August 19 last year, Sam Altman described the plan simply in a tweet on X: make ChatGPT "more affordable in India first", learn from the feedback and then expand it to other countries.

Altman did not have to wait for the feedback for too long. At Rs 399 per month, the low-cost, mid-tier subscription plan likely wasn't enticing and cheap enough for people in India to pay for it in droves. While no official figure was published on how many shelled out money for the affordable plan, it certainly wasn't enough to make Altman and his team wait patiently for people to hit the subscription button. Because just two months down the line, the AI startup announced a 12-month free promotional subscription to ChatGPT Go for users in India.

To be sure, another AI startup, Perplexity, had also announced a similar free promotional subscription for users of telecom operator Airtel in India, while Google provided an 18-month free subscription to the Google AI Pro plan featuring Gemini models for eligible users of Mukesh Ambani's Jio.

This was clearly an attempt to make users habituated to the models and ramp up the chances of conversion when the promotional period ends.

As the ChatGPT Go launch in India completes a year, The Head and Tale looks at OpenAI's India journey and how the launch of the affordable plan marked a major push by the AI startup to expand its India presence. It is worth noting that OpenAI had selected Stripe to handle payments for the ChatGPT Go launch in India. However, when the plan rolled out on August 19 last year, The Head and Tale reported that it hit a roadblock as Stripe's UPI integration suffered severe glitches on the first day, forcing OpenAI to temporarily suspend the UPI payment option. 

Despite the rocky start, over the past year since the launch of ChatGPT Go, OpenAI has opened its office in the country, expanded its team with the latest appointment of former Uber India and South Asia President Prabhjeet Singh as its first Managing Director for India, boosted its enterprise partnerships, and invested in AI education. Its user base has also multiplied, with Altman saying earlier in February that India had 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, making it OpenAI's second-largest market globally after the US.

The Beginning – We love India

India was always on OpenAI’s radar as a market to sell its subscription-based models, and it moved fast from the outset to scout for paying subscribers.

So, when the AI startup launched ChatGPT Plus, costing $20 per month, in India in March 2023 after the initial rollout in the US earlier that year, Altman tweeted, 'we love India'.

Altman also made his first visit to India in 2023 and met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and addressed students and developers at IIT Delhi. However, much of that visit was drowned in the controversy over his comments on India’s ability to build foundation models. At an Economic Times event, Altman was asked by Rajan Anandan, managing director at venture capital firm Peak XV Partners and former Google India head, whether three Indian engineers with $10 million could build something substantial in foundation models. His answer was blunt: it was “pretty hopeless” to compete with OpenAI on foundation models. The comment drew pushback from the Indian industry, with Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani responding, "Challenge accepted". Altman later clarified that he was referring to competing with OpenAI directly at the foundation-model level, and said Indian startups could still build distinctive AI applications.

However, ChatGPT downloads continued to rise in India. According to Appfigures, ChatGPT’s mobile app was downloaded nearly 54 million times globally by October 2025. The US was the largest market, accounting for 20% of all downloads, followed by India at 12%. ChatGPT had also earned more than $10 million in mobile app store net revenue from subscriptions by October 2025. The US accounted for 59% of the share, while India accounted for just 2%, indicating that the latter country had fewer paying customers.

Still, given the rise in ChatGPT app downloads in India, OpenAI sought to put together its India team. So, in late 2023, it emerged that the AI startup was working with former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior adviser and exploring plans to build a local team. Jaitly’s LinkedIn profile lists his OpenAI role from 2023 to January 2025.

Doubling down on India team

But it was not until April 2024 that OpenAI appointed Pragya Misra as its first employee in India to lead its public policy and partnerships.

After the appointment, Misra, who was previously Director of Public Affairs at Truecaller and spent three years at Meta, where she worked on WhatsApp’s 2018 misinformation campaign, held the fort alone for OpenAI in India for more than a year.

The Altman-led company then went on a hiring spree in India after it announced its plans to open its first office in the country in New Delhi in August 2025. The same month, it announced the appointment of Raghav Gupta, former Asia Pacific MD at Coursera, to lead its education vertical across India and APAC. At the time, it also launched India-specific education programmes, including a learning accelerator in collaboration with IIT Madras, AICTE and the Ministry of Education, aimed at driving the adoption of AI tools among educators and students. The launch of education programmes at that time was also significant as debates around job losses because of AI were gaining ground.

The same month, it also appointed former Meta executive Sheeladitya Mohanty as Marketing Lead for India and Akash Iyer, who was formerly with Netflix as films and series marketing manager, as Social Lead for India.

Later in 2025, Misra was promoted to Head of Strategy & Global Affairs, India, expanding her role across product, policy, partnerships and ecosystem development. Later that month, Vivekdeep Gupta, who was previously with a London-based enterprise software and blockchain firm R3, joined its go-to-market team to lead enterprise adoption in India.

The team expansion continued into 2026 (see GFX), with the announcement of its most significant hire to date as it appointed Prabhjeet Singh, former Uber India/South Asia president, as OpenAI's first Managing Director for India. He will join in September this year. Notably, OpenAI’s rival Anthropic had already appointed former Microsoft India head Irina Ghose as its Managing Director for India in January 2026.

Amidst the hiring spree this year, it should be noted that Srinivas Narayanan, OpenAI’s Chief Technology Officer for B2B Applications, left the company after nearly three years. While he was not part of the India office, he had been closely involved in the company’s India efforts.

Partnerships with Indian corporates/startups

OpenAI started stitching together partnerships with Indian corporates and startups from mid-2025.

In June last year, the AI company entered a multi-year strategic collaboration with Indian IT major HCLTech to drive enterprise AI adoption, with HCLTech integrating OpenAI's models across its AI offerings and client solutions. The partnership with an IT company was significant as debates around how AI will erode the businesses of Indian IT companies, which have been major drivers of services growth, had begun to mount.

Later that year, OpenAI partnered with Indian fintech major Razorpay and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), operator of the real-time digital payments system Unified Payments Interface (UPI), to pilot Agentic Payments on ChatGPT. The partnership was significant as it not only sought to change AI from a basic research tool into a shopping assistant, but also gave OpenAI an entry point into India's digital payments ecosystem.

OpenAI continued to strike more partnerships, with major ones unveiled during the AI Impact Summit held in India earlier in 2026. A major tie-up was with Tata Group, which is partnering with OpenAI to develop local, AI-ready data centre capacity designed for data residency, security and long-term domestic capability. The AI company also said that it would become the first customer of Tata Consultancy Services’ HyperVault data centre business, beginning with 100 megawatts of capacity and with the potential to scale to 1 gigawatt over time.

OpenAI also partnered with another Indian IT major Infosys to integrate its AI models, including Codex, into Infosys Topaz Fabric, helping enterprises move from AI experimentation to practical deployment.

Apart from these deals, OpenAI has also struck partnerships across enterprise, payments, commerce, media and consumer with PhonePe, Pine Labs, CARS24, Eternal, JioHotstar, MakeMyTrip and Nykaa.

With these partnerships, India has moved from being primarily a consumer market to a broader strategic ecosystem for OpenAI.

Copyright and other challenges

However, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for OpenAI in India.

In November 2024, Indian news agency ANI sued OpenAI in the Delhi High Court, alleging unauthorised use of its copyrighted content to train AI models and fabricated attribution in ChatGPT responses. The copyright battle soon widened, with the Federation of Indian Publishers, whose members include Penguin Random House, Bloomsbury India and Pan Macmillan, filing a separate lawsuit against OpenAI while also seeking to intervene in the ANI proceedings. Hindustan Times, The Indian Express and NDTV also sought to join the ANI case.

OpenAI initially argued that Indian courts had no jurisdiction because its servers and data storage are located entirely outside India.

This was not an isolated dispute for OpenAI but part of a broader backlash that AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity were facing from media and publishing organisations in the US, UK and Europe over the unauthorised use of their content and data to train AI models.

As the copyright dispute over the use of publishers’ content to train AI models gathered pace, OpenAI extended its partnership with global news publishers’ association WAN-IFRA to India, launching the South Asia Newsroom AI Catalyst. The programme brought 16 news organisations to New Delhi to explore AI applications for their newsrooms.

As a major relief to OpenAI, the Delhi High Court in July 2026 refused to grant ANI an interim injunction, finding prima facie that OpenAI's use of ANI's works to train the LLMs (large language models) underlying ChatGPT fell within the fair-dealing exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act. The court also rejected ANI's claims over ChatGPT's outputs, finding no prima facie evidence that the chatbot had memorised or substantially reproduced ANI's original works. However, the court held that it had territorial jurisdiction to hear the case and clarified that its findings were limited to the interim application and would not determine the final outcome of the suit.

Copyright is not the only regulatory challenge OpenAI will have to navigate in India. The country’s AI policy framework is evolving alongside the technology, with new requirements around data protection and AI-generated content, while regulators such as the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) are also stepping up oversight of AI use in financial services. As OpenAI deepens its partnerships with Indian enterprises and fintech companies, its growing local team could come in handy. Several of its recent hires have already worked on public policy and with Indian policymakers, giving the company people on the ground who understand how the country’s regulatory system works.

What next?

OpenAI’s efforts to double down in India are obvious, as it, like other tech giants including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix and Uber, and its rival Anthropic, seeks to tap into India’s huge internet customer base. But history has proved that while app downloads and usage are high, it is hard to extract payments from users in the country.

So that brings us to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Go, whose free subscription validity will be ending soon in India, and how many of those users will translate into paying subscribers. Monetisation is also important for OpenAI as it prepares for an initial public offering (IPO), having confidentially filed draft papers for a public issue in June. The company, which is still burning a lot of cash, will need to show that it can turn its huge user base into a meaningful revenue stream so its bet on ChatGPT Go, which has now expanded to additional 170 countries, could be huge.

Recent data from India indicates that people are willing to pay for subscriptions. According to a report by Sensor Tower, India’s mobile app market recorded a record $345 million in consumer spending in the second quarter of 2026, up 35% from a year earlier. The app-market intelligence firm said the growth was increasingly driven by generative AI, streaming and productivity apps rather than gaming, as Indian consumers showed a growing willingness to pay for digital subscriptions.

While the data may be positive, OpenAI will have to brace for intense competition from Anthropic, which is also doubling down on India, and Google and the likes, which already know the market, as they all chase the same set of customers who maybe willing to pay for AI models.

-- graphics by Muskan Singh