OpenAI's ChatGPT platform has announced a significant expansion in its enterprise adoption and technological capabilities, with over one million businesses globally now utilizing its products. This milestone coincides with the November 2025 release of GPT-5.1, featuring enhanced reasoning capabilities and improved user-friendly tonal controls. Simultaneously, the company faces escalating legal and ethical challenges, including a German court ruling on music copyright infringement and new lawsuits alleging its AI models contributed to suicides.
The rapid increase to one million business clients marks ChatGPT as one of the fastest-growing business platforms, according to OpenAI. Companies across diverse sectors like finance, healthcare, and retail, including Amgen, Booking.com, Cisco, Morgan Stanley, T-Mobile, Target, and Thermo Fisher Scientific, are integrating its AI tools. This commercial expansion is underpinned by recent product developments designed for enterprise use, such as OpenAI's "company knowledge" update in October 2025, which allows business, enterprise, and education users to search internal workplace data across platforms like Slack and Google Drive using GPT-5. The firm also introduced Instant Checkout in September 2025, enabling direct product purchases from platforms such as Etsy and Shopify within ChatGPT conversations.
Technological advancements continue with updates like GPT-5-Codex, an AI coding agent rolled out in September 2025, offering dynamic task handling capabilities for software engineering tasks. OpenAI also expanded its budget-friendly ChatGPT Go plan to 16 new Asian countries and reported 800 million weekly active users in October 2025. These developments support an ambitious data center project, reportedly valued at $50 billion in partnership with SoftBank and Oracle, to bolster AI infrastructure and meet rising demand. In June 2025, OpenAI also began utilizing Google's AI chips for its products, diversifying its hardware supply beyond Nvidia GPUs.
Despite this growth, OpenAI navigates a complex regulatory and legal landscape. A Munich court's November 2025 ruling found ChatGPT in violation of German copyright law for reproducing lyrics, establishing a potential European precedent for AI's use of copyrighted material. Separately, seven families filed lawsuits in November 2025, alleging GPT-4o's premature release without adequate safeguards contributed to suicides and psychiatric harm, citing the model's tendency to be overly agreeable. OpenAI has since stated it has implemented parental controls and strengthened safeguards for mental health-related conversations. Earlier, in August 2025, xAI filed a federal lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI, alleging anti-competitive collusion related to market access.
