Consumers who pay for AI are increasingly choosing Anthropic’s Claude, according to trend data from credit card transaction analysis firm Indagari.
This indicates that AI Labs has a broader and healthier customer base than the typically assumed niche customer base, such as enterprises and startup developers using Claude Code.
Indagari analyzes billions of anonymized credit card transactions from approximately 28 million consumers in the United States. So while that data doesn’t give you absolute numbers about Anthropic’s revenue or total number of customers, it does provide a large enough sample to identify trends.
And for Anthropic, the trend is upwards.
The data we analyzed covers weekly transactions from 2025 to May 10, 2026, and includes payments for items such as subscriptions and API tokens. This shows that Claude’s paying consumers and revenue are increasing month over month, with the segment currently up approximately 75% since January 2026.
Notably, the gains continued even after the company saw a spike in growth from consumers in March, when it refused to allow the Trump administration to use its models for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.
Another indicator of Claude’s growing consumer popularity comes from DataCamp, an online education platform that teaches AI skills to consumers and corporate employees, which it says has about 20 million users.
Consumer interest in Claude at DataCamp has exploded since the beginning of the year. DataCamp told TechCrunch that “Claude” is currently the most searched term on its site, even more than the term “AI.”
While ChatGPT courses remain far more popular among corporate training companies, demand for Claude courses outpaces ChatGPT by 3 to 1 among self-directed consumers, the company said. Demand for Claude courses has increased 18 times in the past 30 days alone.
Still, while Claude’s growth has been impressive, ChatGPT remains the most popular AI among consumers by every measure.
For example, recent data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shows that while Claude is growing well across all platforms this year, it’s still far behind ChatGPT.
As the data suggests, ChatGPT’s growth has been more modest recently (mainly because its reach is already huge), but it still has more paying users, Indagari data shows.
Still, there is no doubt that Claude is starting to make money with ChatGPT this year in terms of funds raised from consumers, as well as general consumer awareness and interest.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are on the brink of becoming publicly traded companies, so we’d like to take a peek behind the wheels of both companies’ businesses.
In particular, it’s unclear how Anthropic’s recent battle with the U.S. government will affect its business. Earlier this month, the government banned Anthropic from using its most powerful, cybersecurity-focused models, the Mythos 5 and Fable 5, by non-U.S. personnel, and the AI Institute removed them from the market completely for the time being.
But so far, all the data we can find shows that Anthropic continues to grow with both consumers and business/enterprise users.
Antropic declined to comment.
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
