For years, ChatGPT has ruled the AI world. It was the name everyone knew, the app everyone downloaded, and the chatbot everyone talked about at dinner.
But something is changing. Anthropic’s Claude is winning over more paying consumers fast.
Indagari, a company that tracks spending trends across billions of anonymized credit card transactions from about 28 million U.S. consumers, has been watching.
They found that Claude’s paying user base has grown roughly 75% since January 2026.
The data covers both subscriptions and API token purchases. It runs from early 2025 all the way through May 2026.
Growth Spike
In March 2026, Claude saw a major surge in new users because Anthropic publicly refused to let its AI models be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons programs.
Many companies would expect a backlash from a political stance like that. Instead, consumers responded by opening their wallets.
And crucially, that growth didn’t fade after the spike. It kept climbing month after month.
Also read: Anthropic Gives Claude More Autonomy
Learning Claude
DataCamp is an online learning platform with around 20 million users. It teaches AI skills to both everyday learners and corporate employees.
Something remarkable happened on their platform this year. “Claude” became the most searched term on the entire site; not “ChatGPT,” not even “AI,” but Claude.
Among self-directed learners, people choosing what to study on their own, demand for Claude courses is outpacing ChatGPT courses by three to one.
Even more striking is that the demand for Claude content jumped 18 times over in just the last 30 days alone.
ChatGPT’s Reign
ChatGPT is still the dominant AI tool for consumers by a wide margin. Data from Sensor Tower, a well-respected market intelligence firm, confirms that ChatGPT leads across all major platforms.
So, Claude hasn’t overtaken its biggest rival, not yet, at least. But ChatGPT’s growth has slowed.
When you’re already enormous, it gets harder to grow fast. Claude, on the other hand, is in a different phase, and it’s gaining ground on ChatGPT when it comes to dollars collected from regular consumers.
Market Share
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly on the path toward going public. That means investors and analysts are watching every data point they can find.
Anthropic’s story is more complicated than most, though.
Earlier in June 2026, the U.S. government banned its most advanced cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, from being used by people outside the United States.
Anthropic pulled both models from the market entirely as a result. It’s still unclear how that move will affect the company long-term.
Yet despite that cloud hanging over the business, the data continues to show growth. Consumer users are up; enterprise and business users are growing too.
