OpenAI still rules AI by sheer size, but it is no longer running away with it. ChatGPT’s apps crossed 1 billion monthly users in May, the fastest any app has reached the milestone, according to Sensor Tower’s State of AI 2026 report.
Yet on the metric that pays the bills, Anthropic’s Claude is pulling ahead: it now earns more revenue per user than ChatGPT does.
Claude’s average revenue per user on mobile in the US rocketed from under $0.50 last September to $2.76 in May. Forbes, citing the fuller report, puts that at roughly 1.5 times ChatGPT’s $1.74. Claude also converts best of any major assistant, with 13 per cent of its users now paying for a subscription.
ChatGPT’s lead on raw users is, meanwhile, narrowing. Its market share slipped below 50 per cent for the first time in March, down from 81 per cent two years earlier, and stood at 46.4 per cent by the end of May as Google’s Gemini (27.7 per cent) and Claude (10.3 per cent) gained ground.
Why Claude’s revenue per user beats ChatGPT
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Part of the answer is how the two price themselves. Claude has no cheap tier; its plans start at $20 a month, so the users it keeps tend to be heavier, paying ones. ChatGPT and Gemini chase scale with low-cost options, which lifts user counts but dilutes the average. The other part is politics.
OpenAI’s deal with the US Department of Defence in February triggered a measurable spike in ChatGPT uninstalls, a sign that users weigh a company’s values, not just its features. Claude was among the beneficiaries: its US audience share has more than tripled.
None of this means Anthropic is out-earning OpenAI. This is consumer-app data from Sensor Tower’s estimates, and it measures money made through phone apps, not the enterprise and API contracts where both companies make most of their money.
ChatGPT also still retains new sign-ups better than Claude, though the report shows Claude closing that gap too.
A price war is brewing
The numbers land as the cost of running AI starts to bite. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that OpenAI is weighing major price cuts to compete with Anthropic, and Google has already trimmed its cheapest Gemini plan to $5 a month. The squeeze may get worse: Apple is about to ship a new Siri that runs some AI on the device itself, no subscription required.
Even so, the market is still expanding fast. Sensor Tower expects consumers to spend more than $4bn on AI apps in the first half of 2026, up 36 per cent on the previous six months and well above the $1.83bn they spent a year earlier.
