Anthropic is increasingly winning over paying consumers for its Claude AI assistant. According to data from credit card transaction analysis company Indagari, which analyzes billions of anonymized transactions from about 28 million US consumers, the number of paying users of Claude has grown by 75% since January 2026. This trend emerges from a large enough sample to identify significant patterns, though it does not provide absolute revenue figures.
Indagari data shows steady monthly growth
The data covers weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026 and includes payments for subscriptions and API tokens. Growth has been consistent month over month, with a spike in March 2026 when Anthropic refused to allow its models to be used for mass surveillance of Americans by the Trump administration and for autonomous weapons. This ethical stance attracted positive consumer attention and accelerated adoption.
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Interest in Claude explodes on DataCamp
Another indicator comes from DataCamp, an online education platform with about 20 million users. Consumer interest in Claude has exploded since the beginning of the year. "Claude" is now the most searched term on the site, surpassing even "AI", according to DataCamp. While ChatGPT courses are still far more popular among businesses for corporate training, among self-directed consumers, demand for Claude courses outpaces ChatGPT by three to one. In the last 30 days, demand for Claude courses increased 18-fold.
ChatGPT remains leader but Claude gains ground
Despite Claude's impressive growth, ChatGPT remains by far the most popular AI among consumers in every metric. Sensor Tower data shows robust growth for Claude across all platforms, but still far behind ChatGPT. However, Indagari data indicates that ChatGPT's growth has been more modest recently, largely due to its enormous existing base. Claude is beginning to close the gap in terms of dollars collected from consumers, as well as general awareness and interest.
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Government challenges and future outlook
Anthropic faces new challenges: earlier this month, the US government banned Anthropic from allowing its most powerful cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, to be used by non-Americans, causing the AI lab to pull them from the market. Despite this, data continues to show growth in both consumer and business users. For more on ethical software development, read our article on Privacy by Design Code Implementation. This trend suggests Anthropic is building a broader and healthier customer base than the niche of enterprise and startup developers using Claude Code.
