In 1963, Ray Kroc (credited with the global expansion of McDonald’s restaurants) served the 1 billionth McDonald’s hamburger live during a nationally televised event on the Art Linkletter show. McDonald’s then added “Over One Billion Served” to their Golden Arches signs at all of their 500 restaurants. And in doing so, they accomplished something much larger than the sales of the burgers themselves. They achieved ubiquity.
Ory did the same thing by proxy a few short days ago.
On September 29, 2026 at DevDay, OpenAI, one of Ory’s most well-known customers, announced that they had crossed an important new threshold: 1.2 billion weekly active users.
To put that into context, 1.2 billion people represents roughly 15% of the entire global population. That is equivalent to the combined populations of North America, South America, and Western Europe.
In other words: about 1 in every 7 people on Earth now interacts with OpenAI’s platform every single week. OpenAI and their ChatGPT interface are now indisputably ubiquitous.
More than a billion served.
So why would I assert that by proxy, Ory is, too? Because the identities for every single log-in to OpenAI are powered at global scale by Ory.
Why Did OpenAI Choose Ory?
Managing identity traffic at such unprecedented scale is a monumental technical achievement. But behind the headline numbers lies a critical infrastructure question that every enterprise engineering and security leader needs to ask: How do you reliably authenticate, authorize, and manage identity for more than a billion active users?
When OpenAI experienced explosive user growth during ChatGPT’s historic rise, legacy Identity and Access Management (IAM) infrastructure quickly reached its limits. The team needed an identity architecture built for extreme throughput, global distribution, zero downtime, and complete developer control.
They turned to Ory.
By deploying Ory’s modern, high-performance identity engine, OpenAI was able to support its rapid climb from millions to over a billion weekly active users. Ory provided:
- Unmatched Throughput & Edge Validation: Validating tokens and managing sessions with ultra-low latency globally.
- Architecture Flexibility: Running seamlessly within custom environments while maintaining complete ownership over identity data and traffic observability.
- Engineering Velocity: Allowing a lean security team to manage global scale securely without getting bogged down by monolithic platform constraints.
OpenAI wanted a partner that could help enable our vision for owning our identity processes, data, and success. We have a lot of partners, and Ory is one of our best.”
- Benjamin Billings | Engineering Manager | OpenAI (Case study)
Why Does This Kind of Scale Matter for Modern IAM?
You might think, "My organization doesn't have 1.2 billion human users, so why does OpenAI's scale matter to me?"
Because the nature of digital identity has fundamentally changed. We have entered the agentic era, and AI agents are rapidly outnumbering human users, often at ratios of 100 to 1 or higher today and the future promises even more.
When your software operations shift from human clicks to autonomous AI agents initiating automated workflows, calling APIs, executing tool commands, and querying databases, your transaction volume multiplies exponentially.
If you plan to deploy AI agents into production, scale can become your primary bottleneck. Ory is uniquely positioned for these new agentic scale requirements because our architecture was forged in the fires of OpenAI and ChatGPT’s historic growth. If a platform can handle 15% of humanity, it can handle your enterprise agent workload.
Do Other IAM Vendors Scale to the Level of Ory?
In short: legacy platforms were never designed for agentic velocity.
When evaluating traditional IAM vendors like Auth0, Ping Identity, or Okta for high-velocity agent workloads, organizations consistently encounter two major obstacles:
- Cost Prohibitive Pricing: Legacy licensing models charge heavily per monthly active user or API call. When thousands of AI agents start generating millions of automated tool executions, traditional IAM costs skyrocket out of control.
- Performance Bottlenecks: Many former customers report that sudden spikes in traffic on legacy IAM platforms cause service slowdowns and rate limiting.
In a fast-paced, agent-driven environment, latency and downtime aren't just minor inconveniences, they stall automated business pipelines instantly and the consequences are often profound and immediate.
Why Ory Is the Best Place to Begin Your Agentic Security Journey
Scale and reliability are non-negotiable. If your agent security layer collapses under heavy load, it doesn't matter how robust your access policies are. Worse, if your security setup creates latency, security will be viewed inside your organization as a hindrance to the speed of business.
Ory provides a production-ready solution to secure AI agents at the point of execution, right now, not as a future roadmap promise.
How to Get Started: Discover Before You Enforce
To help organizations kickstart their agentic security strategy, Ory is offering complimentary, limited-time access to Ory Agent Security.
The most critical step in securing AI agents isn't immediately locking down every API or writing restrictive rules, it’s visibility. Before setting up guardrails that might inadvertently slow down innovation, you need to understand what your agents are actually doing today.
With Ory’s "Observe Mode", you can immediately:
- Track Agent Footprints: See every AI agent operating within your environment.
- Identify Execution Patterns: Discover who is directing your agents and what tools or data sources they are accessing.
- Audit Permissions: Map out where agents derive their authorization and identify potential over-privileged access.
By starting with Observe Mode, you gain actionable intelligence across your agent ecosystem. From there, you can implement meaningful, fine-grained "bumpers" to enforce AI agent regulation and control without compromising the speed of business. As maturity and trust grows, Ory then allows you to build agentic security directly into each agent and deploy at scale. Ory was built for the agentic era.
Ready to see what your AI agents are doing?
Get started today with Ory Agent Security and build your agentic framework on the same identity foundation that powers the world's largest AI platform.
Congratulations to OpenAI for 1.2 billion weekly users served and for achieving mass ubiquity. By doing so, you’ve proven Ory’s ubiquity at scale as well. And we couldn’t be prouder.
