Data suggests more paying consumers are choosing Anthropic Claude

In short: New third-party data suggests more people who pay for AI are choosing Anthropic’s Claude, even though ChatGPT is still bigger overall.

What's going on

Data from Indagari, a company that studies anonymized credit card transactions, shows growth in paid consumer spending on Claude. Indagari looks at billions of transactions from about 28 million U.S. consumers, which is a sample large enough to spot trends, even if it cannot show exact revenue.

TechCrunch reports that weekly transaction data from 2025 through May 10, 2026 includes things like subscriptions and API tokens (prepaid credits that let other apps plug into an AI model). In that data, Claude’s paid consumer segment is up about 75% since January 2026.

Another signal comes from DataCamp, an online learning site that says it has about 20 million users. DataCamp told TechCrunch that “Claude” is now the most searched term on its site, even more than “AI.” It also said that among self-directed learners, demand for Claude courses is running ahead of ChatGPT courses by three to one, and Claude course demand rose 18 times in the last 30 days.

Even with this growth, TechCrunch notes that ChatGPT remains the most popular AI tool with consumers by a wide margin, based on other market tracking, including Sensor Tower.

What to watch

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are moving toward becoming public companies, which could eventually mean more detailed financial disclosures. For now, the key question is whether Claude can keep gaining paid users, especially after recent U.S. government limits that led Anthropic to pull some advanced models from the market.

Source: TechCrunch AI