One look at OpenAI’s 2026 Capability Gap report for India, and you see a nation adopting AI in two very different ways. There’s a section of AI users in India that punches well above its weight. But at the other end of the spectrum, at the grassroots level, most Indians aren’t participating in this AI wave.

Survey Thank you for completing the survey! Released in April, 2026, the OpenAI report came to this conclusion based on usage data from ChatGPT Plus subscribers across India. The study does a good job of where and how deeply AI has actually taken root in India.

If you look at some of the insights of the OpenAI Capability Gap report 2026 for India, it will make you reflect on some interesting as well as worrying takeaways. India is a genuine top AI player in the world India ranks among the top five nations globally in “thinking capability usage per person,” according to OpenAI. It’s a metric based on reasoning tokens consumed by ChatGPT Plus users, not the free tier – which is an important distinction.

Also this isn’t passive usage, claims OpenAI, reflecting how Indians are actively solving complex problems, writing code, and analysing data with the help of AI tools. Also read: India AI Impact Summit 2026: OpenAI, Tata Group announce massive AI infrastructure push The builder story is especially noteworthy, according to the report. After OpenAI launched its Codex app in February 2026, India witnessed 4x growth in Codex users within just two weeks, signifying its fastest adoption curve globally.

In both coding and data analysis, India ranks among the top countries globally for using AI. In these aspects, India is the frontier of AI usage and adoption. AI usage is heavily concentrated in India This is where things get uncomfortably real in the OpenAI report.

The top 10 cities in India account for roughly 50% of all ChatGPT users in the country, even though those cities represent less than 10% of the country’s population. That ratio makes AI adoption in India approximately 3x more concentrated than in the US, UK, Brazil, or Germany. Delhi NCR takes the lead in per-capita ChatGPT penetration, with Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Hyderabad close behind as hubs for advanced use.

Also read: Want to work on AI safety? OpenAI launches new Safety Fellowship program for researchers When you drill into advanced use cases, the disparity becomes even more stark. Data analysis usage is up to 30x higher in leading cities compared to lagging ones.

Coding usage shows a 4x gap. Codex usage — which is indicative of serious AI development — shows a 9x gap between the top and bottom cities. India’s AI story, in other words, is really a handful of city-sized stories.

What AI usage looks like in non-metro India Outside the big metro cities, the ChatGPT usage data tells a much different and arguably more interesting story. Beyond the focus on just productivity tools or developer workflows in metro cities, AI is being used for things that actually matter to people’s daily lives in the rest of India. For example, in Assam, 22% of all ChatGPT messages relate to education and learning — about 20% above the national average, according to the OpenAI report.

States like Odisha, Manipur, Tripura, and Chhattisgarh show similar patterns, which suggests that eastern India is leaning heavily on AI as an educational resource in ways urban India isn’t. In Jammu & Kashmir, nearly 1 in 10 ChatGPT messages relates to health and wellness, which is roughly 32% above the national average. Other states like Punjab, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Kerala also showed higher-than-average health-related engagement with ChatGPT, based on the OpenAI report.

The key takeaway here is how AI usage here isn’t about productivity dashboards or enterprise software deployments. It’s people, average Indians, using available tools to fill very real gaps in access to knowledge and care. OpenAI has flagged this gap as the defining challenge of India’s AI second act.

The infrastructure of advanced AI use is clearly there, but whether it can reach beyond India’s top ten cities — into its 640,000 villages and hundreds of smaller towns — is the question that will define the country’s next AI decade. Also read: OpenAI introduces GPT Rosalind for scientific research: What it can do