a16z Releases Top 100 AI Applications List: AI is Stepping Out of Browsers, Embedding into Everything

Original Author: Oliva Moore, a16z Partner

Original Compilation: Peggy, BlockBeats

Editor’s Note: Three years ago, generative AI was still an experimental field for a few products; today, it has become a foundational capability in the software world. From the ongoing battle for the default AI, where ChatGPT still leads, to the evolution of video, music, and voice creative tools, and the emergence of Agent products and AI browsers, the form of AI is rapidly evolving from a “chat tool” into a new computing platform.

By analyzing the traffic, user structure, and functional evolution of mainstream global AI products, this article reveals several key shifts: platform ecosystems are beginning to create lock-in effects, the global market is gradually diverging under policy and technological paths, the focus of creative tools is shifting from images to video and audio, and Agents are pushing AI from “answering questions” to “executing tasks.”

More importantly, AI is quietly moving away from browsers and apps themselves, embedding into operating systems, development tools, and everyday software. As AI transforms from a standalone product into an omnipresent feature, the way we measure it will also have to change.

Below is the original text:

Three years ago, we published the first version of this list with a simple goal: to identify which generative AI products were truly being used by mainstream consumers.

At that time, the line between AI-first companies and other software companies was very clear. Products like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Character.AI were built around foundational models from the start. The rest of the software industry was still figuring out how to use this technology.

That distinction no longer holds. Take the video editing app CapCut as an example. With 736 million monthly active users on mobile, its most popular features are highly reliant on AI, such as background removal, AI effects, automatic subtitles, and text-to-video. Canva has built its entire growth engine on the AI tool suite of its Magic Suite. Notion’s paid AI feature attach rate soared from 20% to over 50% within a year, and AI features now contribute roughly half of the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Starting with this edition of the list, we are expanding our scope to include any consumer-grade application where generative AI has become a core part of the product experience, including CapCut, Canva, Notion, Picsart, Freepik, and Grammarly. We believe this provides a more accurate reflection of how people actually use AI, even though most of the top products on the list remain AI-native.

As usual, our web list is ranked by monthly unique visits in January 2026 according to SimilarWeb; the mobile app list is ranked by monthly active users (MAU) in January 2026 according to Sensor Tower.

Here are our key observations:

ChatGPT Still Leads, But the Battle for the ‘Default AI’ Has Begun

ChatGPT remains the largest consumer AI product by a significant margin. On the web, measured by monthly visits, it is 2.7x larger than the second-ranked Gemini; on mobile, measured by MAU, it is 2.5x larger.

Over the past year, ChatGPT added 500 million weekly active users, now reaching 900 million. This is particularly impressive given the inherent challenge of sustaining growth at such a massive scale. Today, over 10% of the global population uses ChatGPT weekly.

But we are also starting to see the field expand, with other horizontal platforms accelerating their rise for specific use cases. Over the past year, Gemini and Claude have seen significantly faster growth in paid subscribers in the US (though still far smaller than ChatGPT. On this metric, ChatGPT is about 8x larger than Claude and 4x larger than Gemini).

According to Yipit Data, as of January 2026, Claude’s paid subscribers grew over 200% year-over-year, while Gemini’s growth rate reached 258%. At the same time, we observe increasingly clear multi-platform usage behavior: about 20% of ChatGPT’s weekly active web users also use Gemini in the same week.

What changed? Competitors started shipping real products.

Google made clear breakthroughs in creative models. Nano Banana generated 200 million images in its first week, bringing 10 million new users to Gemini; while Veo 3 is widely seen as a key breakthrough moment in AI video. Meanwhile, Anthropic continued to focus on the prosumer market, launching Cowork, Claude in Chrome, Excel and PowerPoint plugins, and most notably, Claude Code.

The importance of this competition lies not only in who leads today, but in who can build a structurally defensible position. In this space, “context compounds”: the more a large model knows about your information and habits, the better results it can provide, which in turn encourages you to use it more frequently.

Early data shows Gemini’s average monthly sessions per user on the web are rising, though still about 1.3x lower than ChatGPT’s; on mobile, ChatGPT’s advantage is more pronounced, with average monthly sessions per user being 2.2x higher. According to Yipit Data, both companies have industry-leading consumer paid subscriber retention rates in the US market.

The next layer of “lock-in” comes from the app ecosystem.

Both ChatGPT and Claude have launched their own connector ecosystems—ChatGPT’s GPTs and Apps, and Claude’s MCP integrations and Connectors—allowing users to build their workflows on top of the assistants. Once users connect AI to their systems like calendars, email, and CRM, the cost of switching platforms increases significantly. At the same time, developers tend to focus their efforts on the ecosystem with the largest user base, creating a flywheel effect similar to past platform wars.

We are beginning to see two distinct platform paths emerge. Sam Altman stated that OpenAI’s goal is to “bring AI to billions who cannot afford a subscription,” which is why they have started introducing ads; he also mentioned OpenAI will launch a “Sign in with ChatGPT” identity system, making ChatGPT the default entry point for consumers to connect to the internet. The ambition is to make ChatGPT the starting point for everything: shopping, booking, browsing information, health management, and daily life.

The app directories reflect this direction. As of late February, ChatGPT’s app store had 220 apps across 13 categories; Claude had about 160 officially curated connectors and about 50 community-built MCP servers. However, only 41 apps overlap between the two, accounting for roughly 11% of their combined directories. And these 41 are almost all general productivity tools: Slack, Notion, Figma, Gmail, Google Calendar, HubSpot, Stripe, etc.

Beyond these foundational tools, the two platforms’ paths diverge almost completely.

ChatGPT already has 85+ apps in categories like travel, shopping, food, health & fitness, lifestyle, and entertainment; Claude has almost no presence in these areas. These are consumer transaction scenarios: booking flights on Expedia, buying groceries via Instacart, browsing homes on Zillow, tracking nutrition with MyFitnessPal. This is the most aggressive attempt by any AI company to become a consumer super-app to date.

In contrast, Claude’s exclusive integrations clearly lean towards professional and enterprise scenarios: including financial data terminals (PitchBook, FactSet, Moody’s, MSCI), developer infrastructure (Sentry, Supabase, Snowflake, Databricks), research and medical tools (PubMed, Clinical Trials, Benchling), and a growing open-source MCP community. This is an ecosystem ChatGPT currently does not match.

Anthropic seems to be focusing on heavy AI users (like developers, knowledge workers). These users are more willing and able to pay for more expensive direct subscription services. While ChatGPT also offers products for the same group (e.g., Codex, Frontier), OpenAI has also explicitly stated its desire to make ChatGPT a truly mass-market platform. As the user base expands, this could open more monetization channels. They have already begun testing ads, and taking a platform transaction fee (take rate) would be a logical extension.

If AI assistants ultimately become not just a chat window but an operating environment, the outcome of this competition might not resemble the search wars, where one player captured 90% of the market. Instead, it might be more like the mobile OS wars: two platforms with fundamentally different philosophies, each building a trillion-dollar ecosystem.

Global Usage Patterns Are Splitting by Product

Geographically, the AI market is gradually splitting into three distinct ecosystems, and the gap between them is widening.

The user bases for Western AI tools remain highly similar. The primary user markets for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity are almost the same set of countries: the US, India, Brazil, the UK, and Indonesia (with varying rankings). In China and Russia, these products have virtually no meaningful scale of usage. This is primarily due to policy factors—Western tech sanctions since 2022 have restricted the use of US AI tools in Russia; while China requires AI service providers to complete filings, store data locally, and comply with content moderation rules.

DeepSeek is currently the only product forming a “bridge” between these two major blocs. Its web traffic distribution is: China 33.5%, Russia 7.1%, US 6.6%, with a similar structure on mobile. Meanwhile, Chinese users also heavily use ByteDance’s Doubao and the domestic model Kimi.

Russia, which barely formed an independent market in our previous lists, is now emerging as a third pole and has the second-highest DeepSeek penetration rate. Yandex Browser, integrated with the Alice AI assistant, has reached 71 million MAU, making it one of the top ten mobile AI products globally. At the same time, Sber’s GigaChat has entered our web list for the first time. This pattern is very similar to China’s development path, just faster: sanctions created a market vacuum, and local products filled it within two years.

To observe AI adoption from a per capita usage perspective, we constructed a simple index: combining per capita web visits with per capita mobile MAU to score products on the list, ranging from 0–100. The results reshape the global landscape: Singapore ranks first, followed by the UAE, Hong Kong, and South Korea. The US, which birthed most AI products, ranks only 20th.

Creative 道具s Are Changing

Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion were the products that first introduced generative AI to a large number of early adopters, all launched before ChatGPT. In the early days of generative AI, image generation tools not only dominated creative applications (video and audio generation came later) but also dominated our initial lists. However, this space has evolved significantly.

In the first list published in September 2023, 7 out of 9 products in the web creative tools list were image generators. Three years later, only 3 image generation products remain on the list, but the total number of creative tools is still 7. The change lies in the categories filling the gaps: video, music, and voice generation products have replaced the positions once held by image generators.

The change in the image generation field is essentially a result of “bundling.” As the built-in image model capabilities of ChatGPT (GPT Image 1.5) and Gemini (Nano Banana) continue to improve, the competitive barrier for standalone image generation products has been rapidly raised. In our earliest list, Midjourney was in the top 10; now it has fallen to 46th place. The products remaining on the list today—Leonardo, Ideogram, CivitAI—serve specific creator communities more, meeting niche needs with distinct stylistic features rather than competing head-on with general-purpose generation capabilities.

In this edition, the changes in video generation are most pronounced. Kling AI, Hailuo, and Pixverse have all accumulated real user scale, and Chinese-developed models continue to lead in generation quality. We would not be surprised if apps based on Seedance 2.0 appear in the next list. Meanwhile, Veo 3 became the first US model to approach this level of quality, significantly boosting Google Labs’ traffic and moving it from 36th to 25th place.

Who’s missing? Sora. OpenAI launched its flagship video model Sora 2.0 as a standalone app in September 2025, allowing users to upload their digital avatars (Cameo) to generate videos with real people. Sora topped the US App Store for 20 consecutive days and reached 1 million downloads faster than ChatGPT. However, downloads gradually declined afterward because Sora did not evolve into a viral social app (no one has truly cracked the “AI × social” combination yet), so it did not enter this edition’s mobile list. Nevertheless, according to Sensor Tower, Sora on mobile still has over 3 million daily active users. Many AI video creators still use the model, but the generated content is often published on other platforms.

The music and voice space appears more stable.

Suno (15th) maintained its ranking from the previous list; and ElevenLabs has been on every list since September 2023. Its core capabilities—voice cloning, dubbing, and audio production—remain specialized enough that they haven’t been simply replicated as a “feature option” within large model products.

The underlying pattern is this: when model giants and incumbent platforms (like Google, OpenAI) concentrate creative capabilities in a certain area (e.g., images, and increasingly video), the traffic space for standalone products shrinks. However, even then, opportunities remain to build more stylized, potentially higher-monetization products for specific user groups. Conversely, in areas where giants have not yet entered at scale (e.g., music and voice), the market space is relatively larger.

Agents Have Arrived

The shift towards Agentic AI didn’t start with this list, but with the previous one, with the emergence of so-called “vibe coding.” When Lovable, Cursor, and Bolt entered our list in March 2025, they represented a new product category: AI was no longer just answering questions or generating content but starting to “build things” on behalf of users. This is a form of single-vertical Agent behavior.

Vibe coding has proven to have strong retention among technical users (and some semi-technical users). In this edition, Replit and Lovable remain on the list, while Claude Code (via Claude) also entered. There is still room for growth, as this trend hasn’t truly touched the mass market yet. Currently, the overall traffic of the top five vibe coding platforms is still growing, albeit slower than the initial explosive phase—but as developers and teams use these tools more deeply, revenue for many products continues to rise.

Recently, horizontal Agents have also begun to appear. In January 2026, an open-source project called OpenClaw grew from a single developer’s side project to 68,000 GitHub stars in just a few weeks, gaining mainstream media attention. Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, it is a locally run AI Agent that can connect to a user’s messaging apps and perform multi-step tasks on their behalf.

If ChatGPT was the moment consumers first realized AI could “converse,” OpenClaw might represent the moment they first realize AI can “act.” The product went viral in the developer community, and if our measurement period extended into February (instead of January), OpenClaw would likely have entered the top 30 of our web list.

However, OpenClaw is not yet a product for the average consumer; installation and maintenance still require some Terminal (command line) knowledge. Nonetheless, its attention among technical users continues to rise, and it became the most-starred project on GitHub in early March, even surpassing React and Linux. But judging by the number of new users visiting its installation site, the

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