Overview
- Psychiatrists cited by the Wall Street Journal report dozens of possible cases linked to intensive chatbot use, and a UCSF clinician says he treated 12 hospitalized patients plus three outpatients for suspected AI‑related psychosis.
- OpenAI estimates 0.07% of users exhibit possible psychosis or mania emergency symptoms, which equates to roughly 560,000 people out of more than 800 million weekly active users.
- Usage has scaled rapidly, with Statista reporting over 827 million global mobile downloads of ChatGPT from January through October 2025, including a record 40.5 million installs in January.
- Statista also charts OpenAI’s revenue rising from $319 million in the first half of 2023 to $2.33 billion in the second half of 2024, reflecting the product’s commercial momentum.
- Developers describe new safeguards, with OpenAI training ChatGPT to recognize distress, de‑escalate conversations and point users to real‑world help, and Character.AI restricting teen access after a lawsuit over a user’s death.