Who Is Competing With OpenAI in India?

OpenAI's most serious Indian rival is Google Gemini, backed by a telecom bundle, followed by Perplexity through Airtel, Anthropic's Claude in coding and enterprise, and a new tier of Indian-language models built with government support. ChatGPT still leads on users, but its rivals compete mostly by giving their premium tiers away.

Google Gemini

Gemini has 118 million monthly users in India as of January 2026, and about 15 million daily users, with India accounting for about 30% of Gemini's global monthly users. Its edge is distribution: 18 months of Gemini Pro free for Jio 5G subscribers, bundled with 2TB storage, Veo 3.1 video and NotebookLM, on top of Android's reach.

Perplexity

Perplexity has 19 million monthly users in India, and India is about 38% of its global monthly users. Airtel's offer of 12 months of Pro free, valued at Rs 17,000, gives it cited, real-time search answers to research-minded users.

Meta AI

Meta AI had 12 million monthly users in India in January 2026, riding on placement inside WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.

Anthropic's Claude

India is Claude.ai's second-largest market, and nearly half of use there is software and maths tasks. Anthropic opened a Bengaluru office in February 2026, with customers including Air India, CRED, Cognizant and Razorpay. Together with ChatGPT, Claude captured about 83% of India's AI app revenue in Q2 2026. That makes it the rival that competes for the paying users, not just the free ones.

Indian models

Three groups deserve attention. Sarvam AI released open-source 30B and 105B models in February 2026, trained on IndiaAI Mission compute, strong on Indian-language benchmarks and weak on global English ones. Krutrim (Ola) launched Krutrim-3 covering all 22 scheduled languages and runs its own GPU cloud for Indian enterprises. BharatGen, a consortium of nine institutions led by IIT Bombay, has Rs 988.6 crore in public funding and launched four model families for text, speech, voice cloning and document vision in June 2026.

Two conflicting details

One report says the Airtel-Perplexity bundle ended in January 2026, while another lists it as currently free. Check the current Airtel terms before relying on either. I found no India-specific user figures for DeepSeek, Grok or Microsoft Copilot.

How OpenAI compares

On users, ChatGPT leads: 145 to 180 million monthly users versus 105 to 118 million for Gemini and 19 million for Perplexity. On price, OpenAI's Go year is free, but Jio's Gemini and Airtel's Perplexity offers are longer or richer, so free access is no longer a differentiator. On coding and enterprise, Codex is growing quickly, but Claude has a Bengaluru office, named Indian enterprise customers and a usage profile weighted toward software. On language and sovereignty, OpenAI has IndQA and a Tata data-centre deal, while Indian models compete on local languages and government-backed compute.

Outlook

The battle in India is not about who is best on a benchmark. It is about who owns the distribution channel and who converts free users into payers first. OpenAI has the audience; its rivals have the bundles and the niches.