Anthropic's Claude took 29.4% of direct UK consumer spending on AI subscriptions in July 2026, up from 7.4% in December 2025, according to a new working paper from economists Nikhil Datta, Peter John Lambert and Patrick Schneider. ChatGPT still leads the market, but its share fell from 73.5% to 52.5% over the same seven months.
The paper, titled "Who Pays for AI?", is built on de-identified records from 14 million UK bank and card accounts, weighted to represent adults aged 18 and over. It found that 5.1% of UK adults, about 2.8 million people, paid for an AI assistant in June 2026, more than double the 2.3% rate a year earlier.
Consumer spending on AI ran at £1.07 billion a year at the July 2026 rate, or £1,600 per 1,000 adults in July. That total includes an estimate for subscriptions billed through the Apple and Google app stores.
Key facts
- 01Claude's share of direct UK AI subscription spending rose from 7.4% in December 2025 to 29.4% in July 2026.
- 02ChatGPT's share fell from 73.5% to 52.5% over the same period, while Gemini held at 5.1%.
- 035.1% of UK adults, about 2.8 million people, paid for an AI assistant in June 2026, up from 2.3% a year earlier.
- 04UK consumer spending on AI ran at £1.07 billion a year at the July 2026 rate.
- 05The working paper draws on de-identified records from 14 million UK bank and card accounts.
Claude's gain came in steady monthly steps. Its share of direct subscription spending was 8.1% in January, 15.9% in March, 21.3% in April, 27.6% in June and 29.4% in July. Over the same stretch ChatGPT slid from 72.0% to 52.5%, Gemini stayed between 5% and 6%, and all other products together held about 13%.
The paper attributes part of Claude's rise to technical and professional users on the most expensive plans. Paid AI adoption also varies twelvefold across jobs, from 20.3% of IT professionals, 16.0% of university and college lecturers and 15.8% of finance and insurance professionals down to 2.5% of nurses and midwives, 2.5% of firefighters and 1.7% of social care workers.
Age is the sharpest divide. Adults aged 20 to 29 were 5.9 times as likely as those 60 and over to have ever paid for AI, a gap that narrows to 4.8 times after accounting for income, sex and region. 17.9% of accounts held by people in their twenties showed an AI payment, against 3.0% for the over-60s.
Men were 28% more likely than women to pay for an AI assistant in July 2026, at 62.2 versus 48.6 paying users per 1,000 adults. Adults with monthly income above £4,000 were 88% more likely to have paid than those under £1,500, at 18.8% versus 10.0%.
London leads the regional table with 78.5 paying users per 1,000 adults in June 2026, followed by the South East at 53.5 and the East of England at 50.0. The North East ranked lowest at 37.6, against a UK-wide figure of 50.6.
The researchers matched payments to a registry of more than 200 AI products using statement text, exact prices and product launch dates. Because app store charges hide the product name, the provider-share figures cover direct payments only, and they also exclude card issuers whose privacy filters hide the Claude name. The shares measure subscription spending, not the number of users of each assistant.
The 64-page working paper was released in November 2026 with data running to July 2026. The project is supported by the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy at the University of Warwick, which is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
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