Trend data from Indagari, a company that analyzes credit-card transactions, shows an increase in consumers paying for Anthropic’s Claude. Indagari examines anonymized transactions from roughly 28 million U.S. consumers; while this sampling cannot provide exact revenue or total-customer counts, it is large enough to reveal directional trends.
The dataset reviewed covers weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, and includes payments such as subscriptions and API tokens. Within that sample, Claude’s paid consumer base and associated revenue have risen month over month, amounting to approximately a 75% increase since January 2026 in the measured segment.
Growth continued after a politically charged moment
The upward trend persisted even after a spike in consumer interest in March, when Anthropic refused requests to allow its models to be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance of Americans and for autonomous weapons. Despite that episode, the company’s paid consumer metrics continued to climb.
Learning-platform and search data reinforce the pattern
Data from DataCamp, an online learning platform that reports about 20 million users, also indicates growing consumer interest in Claude. According to DataCamp, “Claude” has become the most-searched term on its site since the start of the year, surpassing even the generic search term “AI.”
DataCamp says that while ChatGPT courses remain far more popular in corporate training programs, among self-directed consumers demand for Claude courses outpaces ChatGPT by roughly three-to-one. It also reports that demand for Claude courses rose 18-fold in the last 30 days.
ChatGPT remains far larger, but the gap is narrowing
Despite Claude’s gains, ChatGPT is still far and away the most popular consumer-facing AI across measures. Sensor Tower market-intelligence data shows Claude growing across platforms this year, but still trailing ChatGPT by a substantial margin. Indagari’s transaction data likewise indicate that ChatGPT still has many more paying users.
Nonetheless, multiple indicators suggest Claude has begun to close the distance with ChatGPT in 2026 in terms of consumer dollars, awareness and interest.
Regulation and product restrictions add uncertainty
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are approaching potential public listings, which makes understanding the revenue drivers behind their businesses particularly relevant. It is also unclear what impact regulatory actions will have on Anthropic’s prospects. Earlier this month, the U.S. government prohibited Anthropic from making its most powerful, cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, available to non-Americans; Anthropic subsequently pulled those models from the market for the time being.
So far, available data continue to point to growth in both Anthropic’s consumer and business/enterprise user bases.
Anthropic declined to comment.
