Claude usage estimates vary as Anthropic shares limited user data

In short: Estimates of how many people use Anthropic’s Claude differ widely, but recent signals suggest rapid growth and more paying customers.

What's going on

Tracking Claude’s popularity is tricky because Anthropic does not publish official user numbers. As a result, public estimates mix different measurements and different time periods.

One often cited figure is about 18.9 million monthly active website users, but that appears to come from earlier in 2025. Other data points paint a very different picture later in the year. In December 2025, Claude’s website reportedly saw about 176.12 million visitors that month, up from roughly 16 million monthly visits in January 2025.

App usage also appears to be rising. The Claude mobile app had about 7.38 million monthly active users in December 2025, compared with around 2.9 million earlier in 2025. By early March 2026, one snapshot showed 11.3 million daily active users on March 2 for the mobile app.

Part of the confusion is that “website visitors,” “monthly active users,” and “daily active users” are not the same thing. It is like counting how many people walked past a store, how many came in during the month, and how many came in today.

What to watch

TechCrunch also reports that an Anthropic spokesperson said Claude paid subscriptions have more than doubled in 2026, but the company did not share the exact number. Watch for whether Anthropic starts sharing clearer metrics, and whether growth keeps shifting from free use to paid plans.

Source: TechCrunch AI