Credit card transaction data from Indagari shows consumers paying for AI services are increasingly selecting Anthropic‘s Claude over competitors.
This trend suggests the company has moved beyond its traditional niche of enterprise and startup developers to build a broader user base.
Indagari processes billions of anonymised credit card transactions from approximately 28 million US households. While the firm cannot reveal absolute revenue figures or total customer counts, the sample size is sufficient to identify clear patterns.
The data points upward for Anthropic.
The analysis covers weekly transactions from 2025 until 10 May 2026, including payments for subscriptions and API tokens. Revenue from paying consumers grew month on month, rising by roughly 75 per cent since January 2026 within this specific segment.
Growth continued after a spike in March, when the company refused requests from the Trump administration to deploy its models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Further evidence of rising popularity comes from DataCamp, an online education platform teaching AI skills to roughly 20 million users. Interest in Claude among consumers has surged since the start of the year. The term “Claude” is now the most searched item on the site, surpassing even the generic term “AI,” according to the company.
Corporate training still relies heavily on ChatGPT courses. However, among individuals studying on their own, demand for Claude courses outpaces ChatGPT by a ratio of three to one. Course demand for Claude has increased 18 times in the last 30 days alone.
ChatGPT remains the dominant AI for consumers across every metric.
Recent figures from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower indicate Claude is growing well across all platforms this year, yet it trails ChatGPT significantly.
ChatGPT’s recent growth has been more modest, largely because of its existing scale. The Indagari data still shows it retains far more paying users than Anthropic.
There is no doubt that Claude has begun to close the gap with ChatGPT this year regarding consumer dollars collected, as well as general awareness and interest.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are approaching public listings, creating a need to examine the stability of their business models.
It remains unclear how Anthropic’s conflict with the US government will affect its operations. Earlier this month, the government banned the use of Anthropic’s most powerful cybersecurity models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, by non-Americans. The lab subsequently removed these tools from the market.
Current data suggests Anthropic continues to expand its consumer and enterprise user base despite these events.
Anthropic declined to comment.
What it means
For people paying for AI tools, the choice is shifting away from the default option. While ChatGPT still commands the largest market share, users are actively seeking out alternatives that align with their values or specific needs. The refusal to cooperate with government surveillance requests appears to have strengthened consumer loyalty rather than damaged it.
