Anthropic’s Claude takes on paid consumers, a market owned by ChatGPT

Consumers paying for AI are increasingly choosing Anthropic’s Claude, trend data from credit card transaction analysis firm Searching He appears.

This is a sign that the AI ​​Lab has a broader and healthier pool of clients from the sector that is generally seen as taking the lead – enterprise developers and startups who use Claude Code.

Indagari analyzes billions of anonymous credit card transactions from approximately 28 million US consumers. So, while this data can’t give us absolute numbers about Anthropic’s revenue or total customers, it is a large enough sample to spot trends.

The trend, in the case of anthropics, is upward to the right.

The data we analyzed covers weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, and includes payments for items such as subscriptions and API tokens. It shows that Cloud’s paying customers and revenue are growing, month over month, currently at ~75% since January 2026 among this segment.

It is worth noting that the gains continued until… After the company saw a significant spike in growth from consumers in Marchwhen it refused to allow the Trump administration to use its models for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons.

Another indication of Cloud’s growing popularity with consumers comes from DataCamp, an online learning platform that teaches AI skills to consumers and business employees, with about 20 million users, it says.

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

While ChatGPT courses are still more popular among companies that do enterprise training, demand for ChatGPT courses among self-directed consumers outpaces demand for ChatGPT courses three to one, the company says. She says demand for Claude’s courses has increased 18-fold in just the last 30 days.

However, although Cloud’s growth is impressive, ChatGPT is still the most popular AI system with consumers in every way.

For example, recent data from a market intelligence company Sensor tower It shows that Claude is growing well this year across all platforms, but is still far behind ChatGPT.

While ChatGPT’s growth, as the data suggests, has been more modest recently (largely due to its already massive reach), it still has a larger number of paying users, Indagari data suggests.

However, there is no doubt that Cloud has begun to make gains on ChatGPT this year in terms of dollars raised from consumers, as well as overall consumer awareness and interest.

Because both OpenAI and Anthropic are on a threshold Become public companieswe’re eager to take a peek at the legs that support their business.

It is particularly unclear what impact Anthropic’s recent battle with the US government will have on its business. Earlier this month, the government announced Anthropy was prevented from letting in its strongestthe cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, have been banned from use by non-Americans, prompting the AI ​​Lab to pull them from the market completely for the time being.

However, so far, every glimpse of data we can find shows that Anthropic is continuing to grow its consumers and partners Business/enterprise users.

Anthropic declined to comment.