Key Takeaways:
- Meta AI passed Google Gemini in US DAU market share, sits behind only ChatGPT for US DAUS.
- Year-over-year growth of daily GenAI chatbot app users has decelerated every month this year.
- Copilot lost 84% of its US daily active users from March to July before Microsoft merged it with its enterprise Copilot app.
Meta AI [META] passed Google Gemini [GOOGL] to become the second largest consumer chatbot app in the US, 17.7% against 17.2%. It got there by adding users in a month when most of the category lost them. Its average time per user increased but still sits far bellow the other players, as we discussed last month. Meta AI’s churn rate increased substantially, now sitting at 53.0%. I’ll state the obvious in that this is about the mobile apps, meaning Google Gemini can be accessed by people in a number of ways outside of the mobile app. It is not my position that the Google Gemini product has more users than the Meta AI product.
Microsoft [MSFT] spent August folding its consumer Copilot app into its enterprise one. Consumer Copilot had already lost 84% of its US daily active users between March and July, falling from 1.1 million to 181k. Removing Copilot from the equation, the rest of the category fell 3.4% in August, a third consecutive monthly decline and 13.9% off the May peak.
Although Kimi briefly passed Grok [SPCX], DeepSeek, Perplexity, and Copilot in daily downloads last month, its numbers have dwindled back to irrelevance for this monthly snapshot.
Is There An AI Chatbot Backlash?
The data center fight has been the loudest AI story of the summer. Gallup found 71% of Americans oppose a data center in their area, worse than nuclear power. Pew put the share of adults more concerned than excited about AI at 52%, up from 37% in 2021. CNBC reported, citing people familiar with the filing, that Anthropic’s forthcoming S-1 will name public antipathy toward its product and the data centers behind it as a risk factor.
So has any of that reached the apps?
August downloads of the top eight chatbots in the US are down 28.3% off their March high, but did gain 1.4% from July to August. Outside of this small M/M gain, downloads had fallen pretty hard since May. Aggregate DAUs still fell 3.9% from July to August.
The market is still growing, just more slowly every month. There are either plenty of Americans not incensed by AI or plenty of Americans who believe in the anti-AI cause but realize they will fall behind without it. Likely a combination of the two. Even with slowing growth, engagement is deepening. Excluding Grok, time spent per user grew 6.8% M/M in August for the grouping. Grok fell 13.5%.
Claude Heading Into The S-1
Claude spent the first half of 2026 doing something that almost never happens in a category with an entrenched leader. It went from 1.3% of US daily active users in December to 16.6% in July. I even wrote in November 2025 that Claude’s hopes of being a mass consumer product could be over. Well, this magical run is over (for now).
Claude’s daily users fell 7.0% in August, 12.4% below its June peak. Share slipped to 14.4%. Downloads fell 10.9% to 3.2 million, 57% off the March high. Anthropic filed its confidential draft S-1 on June 1, meaning the continued decline will not show up when it eventually lands in front of investors.
Time spent per user of its most engaged users crawled back to where it was in January, but still sitting below its March high. Power Users represent the top 10% of users by time spent.
Grok 4.6 Brings New Users
xAI shipped Grok 4.6 on August 12, pitched at long-running agents and interactive work. US downloads jumped 16.6% M/M to 1.9M, Grok’s first up month since January. DAU rose 1.9%, its first monthly increase since February. Still, the average time spent by Power Users dropped for its third consecutive month. Grok’s Power Users continue to spend more time in-app than those of Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Meta AI.
In July, I wrote about Grok users increasingly trialing other GenAI chatbot apps. I wanted to see if Grok 4.6 would trigger any ChatGPT or Claude users to check Grok out. ChatGPT users are not caring but we did see a tick up in Claude users opening up Grok. Still, it’s cross app overlap remains below where it was earlier in July.
