Overview

• OpenAI said it will open its first India office in New Delhi this year, has registered a local entity, and has started recruiting.
• The expansion follows this week’s India rollout of the Rs 399 ($4.60) ChatGPT Go plan that raises message limits, adds more image generations, supports larger file uploads, and extends memory.
• The India plan supports UPI payments and Indic languages but does not include GPT-5’s advanced reasoning.
• OpenAI called India a critical market, citing the largest student user base on ChatGPT and a fourfold rise in weekly active users over the past year, with overall users second only to the United States.
• Rivals are racing to scale access in India, with Perplexity’s Airtel tie-up offering Pro at no extra cost to hundreds of millions of subscribers and Google and Microsoft embedding Gemini and Copilot across core platforms.