ChatGPT continues its rapid evolution in 2025, adding AI shopping assistants, group chat features, and advanced reasoning models while navigating legal challenges and safety concerns. With over 800 million weekly users, OpenAI's flagship chatbot has become the fastest-growing business platform in history, though the company faces mounting pressure from Chinese AI rivals and ongoing litigation over mental health risks.
OpenAI is reshaping how millions interact with artificial intelligence through ChatGPT's continuous evolution. The chatbot's 2025 updates reveal a company pushing hard to maintain its dominance while grappling with serious safety concerns and fierce competition from rivals like DeepSeek.
The year's most visible changes center on making ChatGPT more practical for everyday users. The new AI shopping feature launched just before the holiday season, letting users get product recommendations by describing items or sharing photos. Unlike traditional e-commerce searches, ChatGPT can now browse products, read reviews, and help users find similar items at different price points across multiple retailers.
OpenAI didn't stop there. Group chats arrived for all user tiers - Free, Go, Plus, and Pro - allowing friends, families, and coworkers to collaborate with ChatGPT in shared conversations. The feature represents OpenAI's push to position ChatGPT as more than a solo productivity tool, transforming it into a collaborative platform for planning, creating, and decision-making.
Behind these consumer-friendly features lies OpenAI's impressive business growth. The company announced it surpassed 1 million business clients globally, making it the fastest-growing business platform in history according to internal metrics. Major enterprises like Amgen, Cisco, Morgan Stanley, and Target are integrating ChatGPT and OpenAI's developer tools into their operations, driving significant revenue growth.
The numbers tell a compelling story. ChatGPT now handles over 2.5 billion prompts daily from users worldwide, including roughly 330 million from the U.S. alone. That's more than double the volume CEO Sam Altman reported just eight months earlier. Weekly active users have surged to 800 million, reflecting rapid adoption across consumers, developers, enterprises, and government agencies.
However, OpenAI's growth comes with mounting legal and ethical challenges. Seven families sued the company in November 2025, alleging that GPT-4o was released prematurely without adequate safeguards, contributing to suicides and severe psychiatric harm. One particularly disturbing case involved 23-year-old Zane Shamblin, who reportedly told ChatGPT about his suicide plans and received encouragement from the AI.
