Each dot is ~3.2 million people

About 1.64 billion people have used generative AI as of September 2026: roughly 20% of the world’s 8.1 billion. That leaves about 6.5B people (80%) who have never used it.

Of those who have, about 30-50M people (~0.5% of the world) pay around $20 a month for an AI subscription, and about 30-50M (~0.5%) use AI coding tools. Roughly 40 million people tried AI for the first time in the last month. These are estimates; the sources are below.

The Feb 2026 snapshot is the anchor — it reproduces Damian Player’s original viral chart, which was built from the Microsoft AI Economy Institute diffusion report. That report estimated that 16.3% of the world’s working-age people were using generative AI in H2 2025; the original chart applied that share to the whole world, giving a baseline of roughly 1.3 billion people.

Microsoft’s figure is not a survey. It is measured from anonymized Microsoft telemetry, mostly from Windows PCs: people who spent at least 90 minutes in a month on one of 18 AI apps (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, DeepSeek and others), scaled up for phones and for people without a PC. So it counts regular, deliberate use of AI tools. Things like AI answers in Google search or a support chatbot don’t count.

All other months are extrapolated from public disclosures: ChatGPT weekly active users (OpenAI blog + Sam Altman posts), Gemini monthly active users (Google I/O), Meta AI (embedded in WhatsApp/Instagram), and paid subscriber counts from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The coding-tool numbers are our own estimate, built tool by tool (Copilot, Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, app builders) and checked against developer surveys; the section How we estimate the red dots shows every step.

The Sep 2026 update leans on Microsoft’s Q2 2026 diffusion report (published Sep 21): 18.8% of the world’s working-age people used generative AI in the quarter, up about a point from Q1. Google’s Gemini app passing 1 billion monthly users (Aug 11) and Codex passing 7 million active users (Jul 13) fed the other months.

Because companies report different metrics (DAU vs MAU vs WAU), all figures carry real uncertainty — that’s why ranges are shown instead of false precision.

No. Google shows AI answers at the top of many searches, and by that measure nearly everyone online has “used AI.” This chart counts something narrower: people who go out of their way to use an AI app. Microsoft’s figure, the anchor for the whole chart, counts people who spend at least 90 minutes a month in one of 18 AI apps like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Copilot. AI answers in search, a customer-support chatbot, or AI built quietly into another app don’t count.

Both ways of counting are fair. They just answer different questions: how many people have seen AI, and how many people use it.

No, you’re one dot. Microsoft counts people, not app accounts, and removes the overlap between people who use AI on a phone and on a computer. The user numbers companies announce (ChatGPT’s weekly users, Gemini’s monthly users) are only used to estimate the months between Microsoft’s reports, never added together. Add those up and you’d get well over 3 billion, because they’re mostly the same people.

Each person also sits in just one color, at their most advanced use: someone who pays for Claude and codes with it is a red dot, not a gold one and a red one.

In the grid, yes: the 2,500 dots stand for all 8.1 billion people, and about a quarter of the world is under 15. Microsoft’s own figures cover only working-age people (15 to 64). So the grid is a conservative picture: leave out young children and the share who use AI goes up.

The People online switch above the chart shows the other big filter: about three in four people are online, and among them the share who use AI is noticeably higher.

Anyone who uses AI tools to write software, free or paid: GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, or app builders like Lovable and Replit. We estimate about 40 million people as of Sep 2026 (30-50M). Claude Code has never published a user count, so its share comes from its revenue and from developer surveys. How we estimate the red dots walks through each tool and the arithmetic.

Red sits above gold only because it’s the more advanced use, not because every red dot pays. Lots of people code with free tools, and many paid subscribers also code, so the two groups overlap in the source numbers. Taking the paying coders out of gold is the next fix.

Not anymore. The new people per month bars under the chart show it: since mid-2023, roughly 25 to 60 million people a month have started using AI, and that pace has held fairly steady. Steady new users on a bigger and bigger base means the growth rate is slowing, the classic S-curve.

The animation plays each stretch for as long as it really took, so a six-month gap takes six times as long as a one-month gap. Early versions gave every step the same time, which made the pace look off. Thanks to the readers who pointed that out.

The raw number of new users is still growing — roughly 50–60 million more people try AI each quarter. But the growth rate (percentage change) has been flattening since late 2025, which is typical S-curve diffusion: early adopters are saturated, and growth now depends on converting the skeptical majority.

What is accelerating: paid subscriptions and coding tool usage. Those segments are growing faster than free usage, suggesting the engaged core is deepening its habit even as broad casual use slows.

The big unknown is the next step-change — a truly ambient AI (wearables, OS-level integration) could re-accelerate the curve. Without that, expect gradual S-curve flattening through 2027.

Because most of humanity hasn’t used AI yet. Even at Sep 2026’s estimate of ~1.6B ever-users, that’s only about 20% of 8.1 billion people. The gray dots aren’t empty placeholders — each one represents ~3.2 million people who have never interacted with a generative AI tool.

This is partly geography (limited internet access in parts of Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia) and partly choice. Adoption is still highly concentrated in North America, Europe, East Asia, and urban India.

Gold represents people paying roughly $20/month for an AI subscription — ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, Gemini Advanced, and similar. As of Sep 2026 estimates: around 40 million people globally, or about 0.5% of the world.

That’s fewer than the number of people who subscribe to a single major streaming service in the US alone. The price point ($20/mo) is affordable in wealthy countries but prohibitive for much of the world. It’s also a chicken-and-egg problem: people won’t pay until they see value, and they often don’t see value until they’ve used it enough to build a habit.

Getting from ~20% to 50% adoption would require reaching ~4 billion people — roughly 2.4 billion more than today. The Microsoft report’s diffusion model suggests that at current rates, 50% global adoption is a 2030–2033 target, depending on infrastructure buildout and whether a killer use case (like AI-assisted health or translation) breaks through in lower-income markets.

The fastest historical analog is smartphone adoption, which took about 10 years to go from 10% to 50% global penetration. AI could move faster — or slower, if regulatory friction or public trust issues intervene.