Median monthly messages per active user rose from 14 in 2023 to 36 in 2025, and the top 10% of users sent 63% of all prompts. Epoch AI's ChatGPT usage explorer draws on 8.3 million messages from 5,000 US YouGov panelists.

Huawei plans major gains in AI chip performance by 2030, but US export controls cap its most important scaling levers. Epoch AI estimates Huawei will produce less than 4% as much AI compute as Nvidia in 2026, a share that could be around 1% by 2028 without access to foreign memory.

AI model scores on Epoch AI's IKEA furniture assembly benchmark jumped from 28% to 80% in 10 months, with open-weight models trailing closed-weight models by about 7 months. Epoch AI's test of visual and spatial reasoning across 60 photos from three furniture builds.

Epoch AI measures how fast the cost of a given level of AI performance is falling across five benchmarks covering math, science and games of skill: about 47% per quarter, or 13x per year, since 2023, faster than electricity, compute, batteries or DNA sequencing ever fell.

Acknowledgments of AI use in arXiv math preprints rose from 4% in April 2026 to 25% in August, with 6% crediting AI with a substantial research contribution.

Epoch AI's analysis of trade data finds a pattern consistent with $3B worth of chips smuggled to China via Malaysia. China recorded $3.8B of server imports from Malaysia in 2024–25; Malaysia recorded only $0.6B of exports.

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra tops the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI) with a score of 166, ahead of Claude Fable 5.1 at 164 and GPT-5.6 Sol at 162. Its Math-ECI of 170 sets a new record, but on software engineering benchmarks its SWE-ECI of 164 still lags behind Fable 5.1's 167.

Epoch AI's AI Data Centers explorer now covers an estimated 44% of global AI compute across 86 sites, with a redesigned interface and expanding global coverage.

The share of US adults using AI at least 6 days a week rose from 8% in March 2026 to 19% in August 2026, according to Epoch AI/Ipsos polling.

A first look at Epoch AI's data on compute usage across five leading labs.