The way different states use ChatGPT could tell us a lot about their economies
Last Friday, OpenAI launched a new public dashboard tracking global non-enterprise messages on ChatGPT sent between the summer of 2024 and the end of 2025.
Among the 118 countries analyzed, the US ranked 25th by number of messages sent per capita, with a little over three-quarters of all conversations clustering around just three subjects: practical guidance (29%), writing (27%), and seeking information (19.6%). Zooming into the state level, it becomes clear that not all regions are using the chatbot in quite the same way.
DC topped the list of ChatGPT messages per capita — echoing patterns seen in the use of Anthropic’s Claude — and it’s not hard to see why. The capital, dense with federal agencies, think tanks, and law firms, runs on drafting documents, from memos and policy briefs to endless email chains. It makes sense, then, that nearly a third (32%) of DC users lean on AI for writing, above the national average of 27%. The pattern holds across other top-ranked states, too: New York (No. 3), California (No. 4), and Washington (No. 8), for instance, all show writing as their top use case.
Flip to the other end of the rankings, where the states that use ChatGPT the least sit, and the picture looks different. In West Virginia (No. 51), South Dakota (No. 48), Mississippi (No. 46), and Arkansas (No. 45), practical guidance is the dominant use case, often accounting for 33% to 35% of all prompts.
