Anthropic’s Claude wins in paid buyers, a market managed by ChatGPT

Consumers paying for AI have been choosing Anthropic Claude, trend data from credit card analytics firm Indagari shows.

This is a sign that the AI ​​lab has a wider and healthier customer set than the niche it is generally considered to command – business developers and startups using Claude Code.

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

And the trend, in the case of Anthropic, is up and to the right.

The data we analyzed covers weekly transactions from 2025 to May 10, 2026, and includes payments for things like subscriptions and API tokens. It shows Claude’s paying customers and revenue growth, month-to-month, currently increased by about 75% from January 2026 during this period.

Notably, the gains continued even after the company saw a spike in consumer demand in March, when it refused to allow its models to be used by the Trump administration to target Americans and private arms.

Another indication of Claude’s growing popularity with consumers comes from DataCamp, an online education platform that teaches AI skills to consumers and business professionals, which has about 20 million users, it said.

Interest in Claude among buyers at DataCamp has exploded since the beginning of the year. “Claude” is now the most searched term on its site, even more than “AI,” DataCamp told TechCrunch.

While ChatGPT courses are still popular with businesses that do corporate training, among self-directed consumers, demand for Claude courses outstrips ChatGPT by three to one, the company says. Demand for Claude’s courses has increased 18x in just 30 days, it said.

Still, while Claude’s growth is impressive, ChatGPT is still far and away the most consumer-friendly AI, in every way.

For example, the latest data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shows Claude growing well this year across all platforms, but lagging behind with ChatGPT.

Although the growth of ChatGPT, the data suggests, has been more modest over time (mainly due to its large reach), it still has many paying users, Indagari data shows.

However, there is no doubt that Claude has started to benefit from ChatGPT this year in terms of dollars collected from consumers, as well as general consumer awareness and interest.

With both OpenAI and Anthropic on the verge of becoming public companies, we’re eager to see the legs behind their businesses.

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

So far, however, every snippet of data we can find shows Anthropic continuing to grow both its users and business/enterprise users.

Anthropic declined to comment.