TL;DR
Claude’s paying consumers grew 75% since January per credit card data. DataCamp says “Claude” is now its top search term, ahead of “AI.”
Consumers who pay for AI chatbots are increasingly choosing Anthropic’s Claude over competitors, according to new data from credit card transaction analysis firm Indagari. Claude’s paying consumer base and revenue have grown roughly 75 percent since January, based on Indagari’s analysis of billions of anonymized transactions from about 28 million US consumers. The trend challenges the assumption that Anthropic’s strength lies solely in enterprise developers and Claude Code users.
The gains continued even after a March spike in sign-ups that followed Anthropic’s public refusal to allow its models to be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Indagari’s data covers weekly transactions from 2025 through mid-May and includes payments for subscriptions and API tokens. While the sample cannot provide absolute revenue figures, it is large enough to spot directional trends, and the direction for Claude is consistently upward.
A separate signal comes from DataCamp, an online education platform with about 20 million users. “Claude” is now the most searched term on the site, surpassing even “AI,” the company told TechCrunch. Among self-directed consumers, demand for Claude courses is outpacing ChatGPT by three to one, and course demand has increased 18 times in the last 30 days alone.
ChatGPT remains far ahead on total users. Sensor Tower data published earlier this month showed Claude growing across all platforms but still trailing ChatGPT by a wide margin, though ChatGPT’s market share slipped below 50 percent for the first time in March. ChatGPT crossed one billion monthly users in May, a milestone no other app has reached as quickly.
The consumer momentum matters because both Anthropic and OpenAI are preparing to go public. Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO in June at a valuation approaching $965 billion. Investors examining the prospectus will want to see that growth extends beyond API contracts and into the consumer market where recurring subscription revenue is more predictable.
The picture is complicated by Anthropic’s ongoing conflict with Washington. The US government ordered Anthropic to shut down its most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, earlier this month over a disputed jailbreak, forcing a global shutdown just three days after Fable 5 launched. So far, the clash appears to have helped rather than hurt consumer adoption, echoing the March pattern where controversy drove sign-ups.
ChatGPT courses remain far more popular in corporate training programmes on DataCamp, a reminder that enterprise adoption and consumer preference can diverge sharply. ChatGPT also retains new sign-ups better than Claude, according to Sensor Tower, though that gap is closing.
Anthropic declined to comment on the Indagari data. The company has not disclosed subscriber numbers publicly, but every independent data source that has examined the question in 2026 points in the same direction: Claude is gaining paying consumers at a rate that no longer looks like a niche.
