Who uses AI in 2026?
In the United States, just over half of everyone, children included, has tried AI, and one in three uses it every week. Worldwide, about a third have tried it and one in seven uses it weekly. The two pull apart hardest at the top: 8% of Americans pay for AI against 1% of the world, and 3% of Americans build with an AI coding agent against 0.4% of the world.
These charts count everyone: 343 million Americans and 8.23 billion people on Earth, babies and grandparents included. That is why the "never used" share looks so large. Adults-only numbers run higher. Pew found 49% of American adults using an AI chatbot in February 2026, the St. Louis Fed found 62% of adults aged 18 to 64 using generative AI by May, and Common Sense Media found 86% of kids aged 9 to 17 using AI. The people who have never knowingly used it are mostly under 9, over 65, rural, or, worldwide, offline altogether. About 2.2 billion people still have no internet.
Everyone lands in exactly one of five groups, in rising order of how deep they are in. Two of the groups overlap on purpose in the captions: "tried" means anyone who has ever prompted a model, and "weekly" means anyone who uses one at least once a week, whether they pay or not.
Every square is 3 million people. Each grid is filled from the top left, never-used first, then each group in order. Press play, or drag the year, and the grid and the chart beside it move together. Tap the chart to jump to a year.
The World
One square = 3 million people · 53 × 53
Share of everyone, 2022 to 2026
Each column is 100% of the world's population that year. Gray is the people who have never used AI. Hover or tap for the numbers.
The numbers behind the charts · World
The United States
One square = 3 million people · 11 × 11
Share of everyone, 2022 to 2026
Each column is 100% of the US population that year. Gray is the people who have never used AI. Hover or tap for the numbers.
The numbers behind the charts · United States
Four things worth knowing
1. Trying spread like a consumer app. Paying spread like business software. Building spread like a new craft.
Play either chart and the shape is the same: the gray shrinks fast, the blue and green swell, and the amber and pink stay thin. In the United States the share of people who have tried AI went from 2.5% at the end of 2022 to 53% today. The share who pay went from almost nobody to 11%, builders included. The share who build with a coding agent, a category that did not exist in 2022, is 3%, about 10 million people, and roughly half of them are not professional programmers.
Worldwide the same three curves run two to three years behind. About a third of humanity has tried AI, one in seven uses it weekly, one in a hundred pays, and four in a thousand build. The world is catching up on free, phone-based use. It is not catching up on $20 subscriptions or coding agents.
2. The United States leads on money and building, and trails on trying.
Two big 2026 rankings measure who uses AI, and they place the United States in very different spots. Microsoft's AI Diffusion Report (May 2026) uses device telemetry across 147 economies to estimate the share of people aged 15 to 64 who used a generative AI product in the first quarter of 2026. On that measure the United States is 21st, at 31.3%, behind the United Arab Emirates (70.1%), Singapore (63.4%), and most of Western Europe. The world average is 17.8%.
Google and Ipsos asked online adults in 21 countries whether they had used generative AI in the past year. There the United States came last of the 21, at 40%, against a 21-country average of 62%. Americans are also unusually wary: Pew finds 52% of adults more concerned than excited about AI, up from 37% in 2021.
Yet the United States is where the money is. Roughly 20 million Americans pay OpenAI alone, and the country's paying share (8% of everyone, not counting builders) is eight times the world's 1%. Its builder share is seven times the world's. Americans try AI at European rates and pay for it at rates nobody else matches.
3. The countries using AI the most
Two rankings, two answers, because they count different people. Microsoft counts everyone of working age, online or not. Ipsos asked only people who are already online.
Top 10 · Microsoft, Q1 2026
Share of people aged 15 to 64 who used generative AI, from device data
| # | Economy | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United Arab Emirates | 70.1% |
| 2 | Singapore | 63.4% |
| 3 | Norway | 48.6% |
| 4 | Ireland | 48.4% |
| 5 | France | 47.8% |
| 6 | Spain | 44.2% |
| 7 | New Zealand | 43.0% |
| 8 | United Kingdom | 42.2% |
| 9 | Netherlands | 42.1% |
| 10 | Qatar | 41.8% |
| 21 | United States | 31.3% |
| World | 17.8% |
Top 10 · Google/Ipsos survey, 2026
Online adults who say they used generative AI in the past year
| # | Country | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United Arab Emirates | 85% |
| 2 | Nigeria | 84% |
| 3 | India | 83% |
| 4 | Brazil | 74% |
| 5 | Singapore | 71% |
| 6 | South Africa | 70% |
| 7 | Mexico | 66% |
| 8 | Argentina | 65% |
| 9 | Spain | 64% |
| 9 | South Korea | 64% |
| 21 | United States | 40% |
| 21-country average | 62% |
Nigeria, India and Brazil rank high in the survey and low in the telemetry for the same reason: their internet users are young and enthusiastic, but a large share of their populations is not online at all. Both lists are true. The Gulf states and Singapore top both, small rich countries that put AI into government services early. China is a special case: its own internet authority counts 602 million generative AI users, 42.8% of the country, almost all on Chinese models such as DeepSeek, Doubao and Qwen, since Western tools are blocked there.
4. The countries using AI the least
At the bottom of Microsoft's table are Cambodia (5.7%), Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan (6.1% each), Cuba (6.7%), then a band of East African and South Asian countries at 7 to 8%: Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania, Bangladesh and Laos. Russia and Ukraine sit near 9.5%, Nigeria at 10%, Pakistan at 11%, Indonesia at 14%, and India at 17.6%.
The reason is mostly connection, not interest. The ITU counts 2.2 billion people still offline. Only 36% of Africa is online, against 88 to 93% of Europe and the Americas, and in low-income countries 23% of people use the internet at all. Where people are online, the appetite is often stronger than in the rich world: 84% of online Nigerians had used generative AI, and the survey found people in emerging markets far more excited than worried about it. Microsoft's own split makes the gap plain: 27.5% of working-age people in the Global North used generative AI in early 2026 against 15.4% in the Global South, and the gap grew during the quarter.
Who, inside a country
- Age is the biggest divide. Pew, February 2026: 66% of American adults aged 18 to 29 use an AI chatbot, 61% of those 30 to 49, 42% of those 50 to 64, and 23% of those 65 and over. Common Sense Media finds 86% of children aged 9 to 17 using AI.
- The gender gap has closed. 50% of American men and 47% of women use a chatbot. Worldwide, 64% of men and 61% of women had used one in the past year, down from a ten-point gap in 2023 and 2024.
- Cities and degrees. Microsoft's county data puts working-age AI use at 33% in US metro areas and 16% in rural ones. About 40% of college graduates use AI at work against roughly 20% of non-graduates.
- India is the growth story. ChatGPT passed 100 million weekly users in India in February 2026, its second-largest market after the United States, most of them on the free or $5 Go tiers. India added more new developers on GitHub in 2025 than any other country.
How these numbers were built
No single survey asks these exact questions of an entire population, so the five groups are estimates assembled from named sources and cross-checked against each other: Pew Research Center (February 2026, 5,119 adults), the St. Louis Fed's Real-Time Population Survey (May 2026), SSRS, Gallup, Common Sense Media (June 2026), Microsoft's AI Diffusion Report (Q1 2026), DataReportal, OpenAI's own disclosures (900 million weekly users and 50 million paying subscribers, February 2026), Menlo Ventures, Parks Associates, PNC and Bank of America card data, China's CNNIC, the ITU and the UN's population estimates. Adult and household survey results were converted to whole-population shares, double-counting across subscriptions and coding tools was removed, and 2022 figures were reconstructed from launch-era data. Confidence is highest for the American "tried" and "weekly" figures and lowest for the number of builders worldwide, where vendors report seats, not people. Year-end figures; 2026 is year to date as of September.
- Microsoft AI Economy Institute, The State of Global AI Diffusion in 2026, May 7, 2026
- Google and Ipsos, Our Life with AI 2026, 21 countries, January 2026
- Pew Research Center, Americans and AI 2026, June 17, 2026
- ITU, Facts and Figures 2025, November 2025
- CNNIC, 57th Statistical Report on China's Internet Development, via gov.cn, February 5, 2026
- TechCrunch, India has 100M weekly active ChatGPT users, February 15, 2026