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Anthropic’s Claude is winning over paid consumers, a market owned by ChatGPT
Consumers who pay for AI are increasingly choosing Anthropic’s Claude, according to credit card transaction analysis from Indagari, which tracks anonymized data from about 28 million U.S. consumers. The analysis, covering weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, shows Claude’s paying consumer base and revenue growing month by month, up about 75% since January 2026. Gains continued even after a spike in March, when Anthropic refused to allow its models to be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Another indicator comes from online education platform DataCamp, which reports that “Claude” is now its most searched term, surpassing “AI.” Among self-directed consumers, demand for Claude courses outpaces ChatGPT by three to one, and demand has increased 18x in the last 30 days alone. However, ChatGPT remains far more popular overall. Sensor Tower data shows Claude growing well but still far behind ChatGPT across platforms. Indagari data indicates ChatGPT has many more paying users, though its growth has been more modest due to its already enormous reach. Despite this, Claude has begun gaining on ChatGPT in consumer revenue and awareness this year. As both OpenAI and Anthropic approach becoming public companies, their underlying business health is under scrutiny. Notably, the U.S. government recently banned Anthropic from allowing its most powerful cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, to be used by non-Americans, forcing the lab to pull them from the market. So far, however, available data shows Anthropic continuing to grow consumer and enterprise users. Anthropic declined to comment.