Anthropic’s Claude Sees 75% Growth Among Paying AI Consumers in 2026

Anthropic’s Claude has recorded a 75% rise in paying consumers since January 2026, according to trend data derived from credit card transactions analyzed by Indagari.

Indagari, which processes billions of anonymized credit card transactions from approximately 28 million U.S. consumers, provides a substantial sample size to identify market trends, although it does not reveal exact revenue or customer counts for Anthropic.

The data, covering weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, includes payments for subscriptions and API tokens, illustrating steady month-over-month growth in Claude’s paying user base and revenue.

Notably, Claude’s growth persisted even after a surge in March, coinciding with Anthropic’s refusal to permit its models to be used by the Trump Administration for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons applications.

Additional evidence of Claude’s rising consumer popularity comes from DataCamp, an online platform offering AI training to about 20 million users. Since the beginning of the year, “Claude” has become the most searched term on DataCamp, surpassing even “AI.”

While ChatGPT remains dominant in corporate training courses, DataCamp reports that among self-directed learners, the demand for Claude courses exceeds that for ChatGPT by a factor of three, with an 18-fold increase in demand for Claude courses over the past 30 days.

Despite Claude’s notable growth, ChatGPT continues to lead in consumer popularity across all platforms. Data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower indicates that although Claude is expanding well in 2026, it remains significantly behind ChatGPT in user numbers.

ChatGPT’s growth has slowed somewhat due to its already extensive reach, but it still maintains a substantially larger paying user base, as reflected in Indagari’s data.

Nevertheless, Claude has clearly gained ground on ChatGPT this year in terms of consumer revenue and overall awareness.

With both OpenAI and Anthropic approaching public offerings, interest is high in understanding the foundations of their business performance.

Uncertainty surrounds the impact of recent U.S. government restrictions on Anthropic’s operations. Earlier in June, the government prohibited Anthropic from offering its most advanced cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, to non-American users, leading to the temporary withdrawal of these models from the market.

Despite this, available data consistently shows ongoing growth in both Anthropic’s consumer and enterprise user segments.

Anthropic has not provided any comments regarding these developments.