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- OpenAI has fallen three places to become Australia’s 16th most distrusted brand, while around 10.5 million Australians use ChatGPT.
- Roy Morgan says concerns around privacy, ethics, dishonesty, profit and environmental impact are driving distrust.
- Bunnings remains Australia’s most trusted brand for the 11th consecutive quarter, while Optus is the country’s most distrusted for the second straight quarter.
Roy Morgan has shared their quarterly Trust & Distrust rankings, showcasing which brands Aussies are loving en masse and which we’re all a bit sus of. Bunnings is Australia‘s most trusted brand once again, while Optus still sits at the other end of the line as the country’s most distrusted, wondering why nobody has returned their calls. Given one’s consistent beating prices by 10 per cent and slinging sizzling sausages every Sunday, and the other is dealing with blunder after blunder, the results really don’t come as much of a surprise.
Buried a little further down in the rankings, however, one thing did catch our eye: how quickly OpenAI is sliding down the distrust rankings. Falling three places since the last report, OpenAI is now Australia’s 16th most distrusted brand, despite around 10.5 million Aussies using ChatGPT.
It’s a little ironic, isn’t it? Millions of us already use AI as part of everyday life, even as trust in the companies behind it struggles to keep up. Much like the advent of the World Wide Web, we’re clearly finding the tools useful enough to keep coming back to the well, but that doesn’t mean we’re entirely comfortable with where all of this is heading.
Australia’s Most Trusted and Distrusted Brands
| Rank | Most Trusted Brands | Most Distrusted Brands |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bunnings | Optus |
| 2 | Aldi | Facebook / Meta |
| 3 | Kmart | Temu |
| 4 | Commonwealth Bank | Woolworths |
| 5 | Apple | Coles |
| 6 | Toyota | Telstra |
| 7 | Myer | Tesla |
| 8 | Big W | Shein |
| 9 | JB Hi-Fi | X |
| 10 | Australia Post | Qantas |
At the top of the trusted table, not much has changed. Bunnings has now been named Australia’s most trusted brand for the 11th consecutive quarter, while Aldi and Kmart have held onto second and third place for 10 straight quarters. Here’s to Special Buys and Anko!
The distrusted end is just as familiar, with Optus holding onto the unwanted title for a second consecutive quarter and the usual mix of telcos, supermarkets, social platforms and online retailers filling out the top 10.
Roy Morgan says 65 per cent of Australians distrust at least one company, compared with 47 per cent who trust one. Since mid-2020, Australians have actually been more distrustful than trusting overall.
Against that sceptical backdrop, I find it interesting how these brands move up and down the rankings as the year goes by. But for me, nothing on this list is shifting like OpenAI, and that’s where the latest data starts telling a different story.
Millions of Australians Use ChatGPT, But Trust Isn’t Following
Roy Morgan says around 13.6 million Australians aged 14+ now use AI platforms (in an average four weeks), including 10.5 million who use ChatGPT. Adoption has certainly shot through the roof, but trust in OpenAI has barely moved, with distrust digging a deeper hole for the brand since late 2025.
ChatGPT is comfortably leading the pack. Around 45 per cent of Australians aged 14+ use the platform, more than double the 5 million using Google Gemini and well ahead of Microsoft Copilot’s estimated 4 million users. Canva Magic Studio sits further back at 1.4 million, while Anthropic’s Claude reaches around 777,000 Australians.
AI use is also highest among Australians aged 25-34 and 35-49, with 74 per cent and 72 per cent, respectively, using at least one AI tool. And if you assumed teenagers and twenty-somethings would be leading the charge, think again. Usage among Australians aged 18-24 sits at 68 per cent, while 66 per cent of those aged 14-17 use AI tools.
Why Don’t We Trust OpenAI?
So, with so many Australians using ChatGPT, what’s the problem?
According to Roy Morgan CEO Michele Levine, distrust in OpenAI has grown quickly. But not because something went terribly wrong. There’s no single scandal here. Australians are increasingly worried about what AI companies represent and what they might do next.
And Australians have plenty to worry about: privacy, ethics, dishonesty, profit, greed and the environmental impact of the enormous data centres required to keep AI running. Even someone filming you with smart glasses has become another AI-related concern. Over the past year, Roy Morgan’s own tracking shows things aren’t improving.
Levine describes many of those concerns as anticipatory, with some Australians worried we might lose our ability to think for ourselves. But even as the technology becomes more capable, we’re not necessarily waiting for something to go wrong before deciding how comfortable we are with using AI.
Those concerns also don’t require much first-hand experience with a company to take hold. Palantir is probably the clearest example. The AI defence and intelligence company dropped 15 places to become Australia’s 30th most distrusted brand, even though Roy Morgan said most Australians hadn’t heard of it a year ago. It seems you don’t need to know much about an AI company before forming an opinion about whether you trust it.
We Use Brands We Don’t Trust All the Time
Of course, distrusting a company doesn’t necessarily mean we stop using it. Optus and Telstra are sitting first and sixth on Roy Morgan’s most distrusted list, while Coles and Woolworths occupy fourth and fifth. Yet these brands are woven into everyday Australian life, whether we’re paying a phone bill, buying groceries or simply sticking with the service we’ve already got.
Roy Morgan points out that Aussies kept shopping at supermarkets even as distrust grew, because using a brand isn’t the same as trusting it. Sometimes convenience wins. Changing providers is a pain. Sometimes we don’t want to take advice from a meerkat or Kochie. And sometimes the product is useful enough that we’re willing to set our reservations aside.
That’s what makes the OpenAI result feel strangely familiar. Millions of Australians find enough value in ChatGPT to keep using it, even as concerns about the company behind it continue to grow. The difference, at least for me, is how quickly we’ve reached that point with AI.
Telcos, supermarkets and banks have had decades to become fixtures in our lives. ChatGPT has managed it in only a handful of years. We’re already developing the same slightly uncomfortable relationship with AI: we use it because it works, even if we don’t exactly trust where it’s going.
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