The latest consumption data shows that among users who are willing to pay for artificial intelligence services, the popularity of Anthropic's large-scale model product Claude is rising rapidly, and it is continuing to "steal people" from the consumer market that ChatGPT has long occupied. A number of transaction and usage data from third-party institutions show that Claude's paid user scale and revenue have maintained a steady increase over the past year and more, and the growth rate is significantly higher than the overall AI consumer market.
Trend data provided by Indagari, a company responsible for analyzing U.S. credit card transactions, shows that among the anonymous transaction samples it covers about 28 million U.S. consumers, the number of weekly payments involving Claude has continued to rise since 2025. By May 10, 2026, the relevant consumption amount has increased by about 75% compared with January 2026. These consumptions include both subscription expenditures and pay-as-you-go items such as API Tokens. Although Anthropic's overall revenue and total number of users cannot be directly calculated, it is enough to outline its growth curve in the C-end market as a continuous upward "right-hand" trend.
Remarkably, Claude's growth momentum has not been significantly hampered by its policy conflicts with the U.S. government. In March of this year, Anthropic received a wave of attention and discussion in public opinion for refusing to cooperate with the Trump administration in using its model for mass surveillance of its own citizens and autonomous weapons systems. Subsequently, the growth peak from the consumer side did not fall quickly afterwards, but continued into a longer-term growth trend.
In addition to transaction data, internal statistics from the online education platform DataCamp also show Claude’s popularity among individual learners. The platform says it has about 20 million users, and since the beginning of 2026, "Claude" has become the most searched keyword on the site, even surpassing the general "AI" search term. In terms of course demand structure, although enterprise customers still mainly purchase training courses around ChatGPT, among consumer user groups who focus on individual independent learning, the demand for Claude-related courses has reached three times that of ChatGPT courses. In the past 30 days, the demand for Claude-related courses has surged 18 times.
However, from the perspective of overall market size, OpenAI’s ChatGPT still firmly occupies the absolute leading position. The latest report released by market research organization Sensor Tower shows that Claude has performed very well on all major platforms since 2026, but there is still a significant gap compared with the overall user scale of ChatGPT. Indagari's transaction data also shows that despite Claude's rapid growth, ChatGPT still has a much higher number of paying users and consumption base than its competitors, but its growth rate appears relatively moderate due to its large size.
From the perspective of income and attention, Claude is gradually "approaching" ChatGPT's dominant position on the consumer side. In the consumption trend disclosed by Indagari, the proportion of Claude's revenue from paid users is gradually increasing; at the same time, from DataCamp's search and course registration data to exposure in social media and news reports, Claude's brand awareness is also spreading rapidly, becoming one of the most high-profile "dark horses" in the AI consumer market this year.
This competition between you and me takes place at a critical moment when both OpenAI and Anthropic are standing at the threshold of the capital market. Both companies are regarded as the most promising cutting-edge AI laboratories to enter the public capital market. Anthropic submitted a listing application to regulators earlier this month, seeking to become one of the latest batch of publicly traded AI technology companies. The market is generally concerned about how these real consumption and corporate payment data will be transformed into growth stories and profit prospects in the prospectus.
Meanwhile, the business impact of Anthropic’s latest bout with the U.S. government remains to be seen. Earlier this month, the U.S. government banned Anthropic from making its most powerful cybersecurity-focused Mythos 5 and Fable 5 models available to non-U.S. users, forcing the company to temporarily remove both models from shelves. In the short term, this policy directly cuts off some international business lines, but the multiple sets of data currently available show that Anthropic's overall business continues to expand in both consumer and corporate/institutional customer dimensions.
Previous sales data analysis also shows that, amid the escalating policy conflicts with the Trump administration, Anthropic's corporate and commercial projects have not slowed down significantly, but have instead gained new cooperation opportunities and orders in certain areas. This has led to outside discussions about whether Anthropic's tough stance on public policy and technology ethics has inadvertently helped it strengthen its brand image and further win the trust of enterprises and individual users who value privacy and security.
As of press time, Anthropic had not commented on the above-mentioned issues related to consumer growth and policy impact. What is certain is that while ChatGPT still dominates most of the AI consumer market, Claude has successfully opened a gap in it and moved forward at a faster growth rate. This battle for the big AI model around paying users and brand minds has just entered a new stage between two companies that are expected to go public soon.