Claude Is Gaining on ChatGPT in the One Market That Matters: Paying Consumers
The consumer AI market has long been treated as ChatGPT’s territory — a category OpenAI built, defined, and dominated. New credit card transaction data suggests that assumption is no longer safe.
Consumers who pay for AI tools have been increasingly choosing Anthropic’s Claude over the past several months, according to trend data from Indagari, a firm that analyzes anonymized transactions from roughly 28 million U.S. credit card holders. The data covers weekly payments — including subscriptions and API token purchases — from 2025 through May 10, 2026. It shows Claude’s paying consumer base and revenue both growing month over month, up approximately 75 percent since January 2026.
The mechanism here is not a dramatic market shift. ChatGPT still commands a substantially larger paying user base. But the structure of Claude’s growth reveals something specific: Anthropic is no longer a company whose revenue depends almost entirely on enterprise contracts and developer relationships. It is building a consumer subscription business — and that business is accelerating.
The distribution is broader than the brand awareness would suggest. On DataCamp, an online education platform with roughly 20 million users, “Claude” has become the most-searched term on the site, surpassing even the generic search term “AI.” That signal matters because DataCamp’s user base spans both individual learners and corporate training programs. The consumer segment is choosing Claude at a rate that reflects genuine product preference, not just corporate mandate.
The growth also did not reverse when Anthropic made decisions that could have cost it commercially. In March, the company refused to allow its models to be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons systems. Consumer interest spiked in that moment — and continued rising afterward, rather than normalizing back to a baseline.
The more complicated variable is regulatory exposure. The U.S. government recently barred Anthropic from allowing its most powerful cybersecurity-focused models — Mythos 5 and Fable 5 — from being accessed by non-Americans. Anthropic responded by pulling both models from the market entirely. The downstream effect on revenue and consumer growth from that action remains to be seen. Anthropic declined to comment on the data or the restrictions.
What the Indagari data cannot tell us is whether Claude’s consumer trajectory will survive the constraints being placed on its most capable products. What it can tell us is that the market Anthropic was said to lack — everyday paying users — is now real, growing, and trending in a direction that makes the company’s upcoming IPO math look meaningfully different than it did a year ago.
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