Artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced on Thursday that it will start showing ads to users of its ChatGPT Free and Go subscription tiers in India. In early August, the company updated its terms of service and said that users will see ads while using the AI assistant.
India is ChatGPT’s second-largest market after the US, as OpenAI reported in February that it had over 100 million weekly active users in the country. A large portion of users use the free or low-cost Go tier.
OpenAI said Wednesday that it will launch with 50 brand ads and has partnered with agencies WPP and Omnicom, according to TechCrunch.
The company will also launch an ad manager in September. Marketers will be able to use this service to develop campaigns for their businesses. However, those campaigns will have a minimum daily budget of $7.60.
The company began showing ads to US adult users in February and expanded the program to serve ads in 31 European markets earlier this month.
OpenAI is working hard to attract its users in India. In August 2025, the company launched a low-cost paid plan in the country, ChatGPT Go, which costs less than $5.
The company also announced a research collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and $500,000 funding to IIT–Madras in the same month. In November last year, the company launched the “ChatGPT Go Promo” in the country. Under this offer, many eligible Indian users got the opportunity to use ChatGPT Go for free for a year.
In March 2025, during the Ghibli trend, a large number of users in India used ChatGPT to transform selfies or any images into the magical and artistic animation style of the famous Japanese animation studio “Studio Ghibli.” As a result, OpenAI quickly gained a large number of new users from India and other countries.
In February this year, the company announced that it has an existing presence in New Delhi and also announced plans to open new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru, known as India’s Silicon Valley, by the end of 2026.
In the same month, Open AI and Tata Group also announced a strategic collaboration to build a “state-of-the-art AI infrastructure” in India.
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