Paying consumer spend on Claude is up roughly 75% since January 2026, according to credit card transaction data from Indagari, which analyzes billions of anonymized transactions across about 28 million U.S. consumers. The trend complicates the conventional read on Anthropic as a developer-and-enterprise shop riding Claude Code, and puts the company on a clearer collision course with ChatGPT in the subscription tier OpenAI has dominated since 2023.
Indagari's dataset covers weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, including subscription payments and API token purchases. It does not yield absolute revenue or user counts, but the sample is large enough to surface direction. The direction, for Anthropic, is consistently up month over month.
The growth held through a politically fraught quarter. Anthropic saw a consumer spike in March 2026 after it refused to allow its models to be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons systems. Rather than reverting after the news cycle moved on, paying consumer spend kept climbing into the spring.
Key facts
- 01Claude's paying consumers and revenue are up about 75% since January 2026, based on Indagari transaction data covering 28 million U.S. consumers.
- 02On DataCamp, which has 20 million users, demand for Claude courses jumped 18x in the last 30 days.
- 03Among self-directed consumers on DataCamp, Claude course demand is outpacing ChatGPT by 3 to 1.
- 04Claude's consumer growth continued after Anthropic refused to let its models be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons in March.
- 05ChatGPT still leads on absolute paying users and overall reach, per Sensor Tower and Indagari.
A second data point comes from DataCamp, the online education platform that says it has about 20 million users learning AI skills. Interest in Claude among DataCamp users has, in the company's framing, exploded since the start of the year.
DataCamp told TechCrunch that "Claude" is now the most searched term on its site, ahead of "AI" itself, and that demand for Claude courses has increased 18x in the last 30 days alone. Among self-directed learners — consumers paying for their own training, rather than enterprises buying corporate seats — Claude course demand is outpacing ChatGPT by three to one. ChatGPT still leads comfortably in corporate training, which is the larger pot of money.
That split matters. Corporate training budgets follow incumbents, and ChatGPT remains the default brand inside most enterprises. Self-directed learner demand, by contrast, is a leading indicator of where individual professionals expect to spend their next few years of skill-building. Three-to-one in that segment is not a rounding error.
ChatGPT is still the larger business by a wide margin. Sensor Tower data shows Claude growing well across platforms in 2026 but trailing ChatGPT on overall reach, and Indagari's transaction data indicates ChatGPT continues to count many more paying users in absolute terms. OpenAI's growth has slowed in percentage terms, which is what happens when the denominator is already enormous.
What has changed is the rate at which dollars from individual consumers are flowing to Anthropic specifically. A year ago, the consumer AI subscription market was a near-monopoly story. The 75% jump in Claude's paying consumer cohort since January, combined with the DataCamp signal, suggests a real second market leader is forming on the consumer side rather than just on the developer API side.
The picture is not without risk. Earlier this month, the U.S. government banned Anthropic from allowing its most powerful cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, to be used by non-Americans, prompting Anthropic to pull the models from the market altogether for now. That removes a revenue line and signals more friction between Anthropic and federal regulators on national security use cases. Anthropic declined to comment on the consumer figures.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are widely expected to test the public markets, and the consumer line item is going to matter when they do. Enterprise contracts get the headlines, but recurring consumer subscriptions are the cleanest revenue an AI company can show — high margin, low concentration risk, and a brand moat that compounds. If Anthropic can demonstrate that a second-place consumer brand can grow 75% in five months against an entrenched leader, the equity story stops being a developer-tools story and starts being a platform story. That is a materially different valuation conversation, and it is the one Anthropic appears to be quietly building toward.
Working on something we should cover, or seeing a story we missed? Send leads, documents, or feedback to hello@aichatdaily.com. For sensitive tips, see our secure tips page for Signal and PGP options.
Spotted an error? Email hello@aichatdaily.com with the URL and the issue, or read our full corrections policy.
