Anthropic’s Claude is winning over paid consumers, a market owned by ChatGPT

Consumers paying for AI are increasingly choosing Claude from credit card transaction analytics company Anthropic Indagari shows.

This is a sign that the AI ​​lab has a broader and healthier group of customers than the niche it typically falls under: enterprise developers and startups using Claude Code.

Indagari analyzes billions of anonymized credit card transactions from approximately 28 million U.S. consumers. So while that data can’t give us absolute numbers on Anthropic’s revenue or total number of customers, it’s a large enough sample to spot trends.

And the trend in Anthropic’s case is up and to the right.

The data we analyzed covers weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, and includes payments for things like subscriptions and API tokens. This shows that Claude’s paying consumers and revenue are growing month on month, currently around 75% since January 2026 in this segment.

Notably, gains continued even after the company saw a spike in consumer growth in March when it refused to allow its models to be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons.

Another indicator of Claude’s growing popularity among consumers comes from DataCamp, an online education platform that teaches AI skills to consumers and business workers, with about 20 million users, it says.

Interest in Claude among DataCamp consumers has skyrocketed since the beginning of the year. “Claude” is now the most searched term on its site, even more than the term “AI” itself, DataCamp tells TechCrunch.

While ChatGPT courses are still much more popular among corporate training companies, demand for Claude courses among self-directed consumers outpaces ChatGPT three to one, the company says. Demand for courses on Claude has increased 18-fold in the past 30 days alone, the report says.

While Claude’s growth is impressive, ChatGPT is still by far the most popular AI among consumers, by all accounts.

For example, recent data from a market information agency Sensor tower shows that Claude is growing well on all platforms this year, but still far behind ChatGPT.

While ChatGPT’s growth, the data shows, has been more modest recently (largely due to its already massive reach), it still has many more paying users, Indagari’s data shows.

Still, there’s no doubt that Claude has started making a profit on ChatGPT this year in terms of dollars raised from consumers, as well as overall consumer awareness and interest.

Since both OpenAI and Anthropic are on the cusp of becoming publicly traded companies, we’d like to take a look at the legs that support their companies.

It’s especially unclear what impact Anthropic’s latest battle with the U.S. government will have on its business. Earlier this month, the government banned Anthropic from allowing its most powerful cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, to be used by non-Americans, prompting the AI ​​lab to pull them off the market altogether for the time being.

But so far, every glimpse of data we can find shows that Anthropic continues to grow both its consumer and business/enterprise users.

Anthropic declined to comment.