OpenAI is working on building its own Twitter-like social network, according to multiple sources of The Verge — a move that would amplify CEO Sam Altman's already-bitter rivalry with Elon Musk, who in February made an unsolicited offer to purchase OpenAI for $97.4B.
Here's what The Verge knows about the endeavor:
- There's an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT's image generation that has a social feed.
- Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project.
- It's unclear whether OpenAI plans to release the social network as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which became the most downloaded app globally last month.
- A social app would give OpenAI its own unique, real-time data that X and Meta already have to help train their AI models.
The Verge notes that launching a social app would also put OpenAI on more of a collision course with Meta, which is planning to add a social feed to its coming standalone app for its AI assistant. When reports of Meta building a rival to the ChatGPT app surfaced a few months ago, Altman posted on X, “ok fine maybe we'll do a social app.”
Does the world need yet another Twitter clone?
There's already Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, Nostr, and of course Substack, which has been actively moving in the X / TikTok direction in recent months. However even after years of development, none come close to OpenAI's reach.
As of March 2025, OpenAI’s ChatGPT app has been installed approximately 600M times globally across iOS and Android platforms, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. In March 2025 alone, ChatGPT achieved 46M new downloads, 13M from Apple App Store and 33M from Google Play, making it the most downloaded non-gaming app worldwide for that month.
These numbers trump the monthly active users on Threads (300M), Substack (35M), Bluesky (33M), and Mastodon (15M), but comes close to X's active user base, which is slightly above 600M according to recent estimates.
So do we need yet another social network? Likely not, but if anyone were to succeed in rivaling Meta, X, and TikTok, OpenAI would be the ones to do it. No other social network on the list above has technology that even comes close to OpenAI when it comes to AI-powered image and video generation tools or integration with real-time news articles.
If properly executed, an OpenAI social network could pose a real threat to Meta and X.