Feb 20 (Reuters) - ChatGPT developer OpenAI's weekly

active users surged past 400 million in February, a company

spokesperson told Reuters on Thursday, highlighting rapid growth

in the adoption of artificial intelligence tools.

The Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed startup had 300 million weekly

active users in December. Its paying business users also crossed

2 million in February, more than doubling from its last update

in September.

The upbeat numbers come weeks after China's DeepSeek

launched an AI model it said could match or even outperform

Western rivals at a fraction of the cost, stirring doubts about

U.S. dominance in the generative AI space.

But a surge in demand for DeepSeek since then has caused

outages at the small startup.

There have also been questions around how DeepSeek was able

to obtain Nvidia's H800 chips, used to train AI models, even

though Washington had banned their exports to China.

OpenAI reported a twofold increase in developer traffic for

its reasoning models over the last six months and a fivefold

surge for its o3 model since its launch in late January.

The news about OpenAI's weekly users was first reported by

CNBC earlier in the day.

(Reporting by Rishi Kant in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika

Syamnath)