Claude Grows by 75% Among Paying Users: ChatGPT Losing Ground Among Consumer Users
Claude Grows by 75% Among Paying Users: ChatGPT Losing Ground Among Consumer Users
Claude's paying user base has grown by approximately 75% since January 2026, continuing to rise month after month. This data comes from a credit card transaction analysis conducted by Indagari and reported by TechCrunch, based on billions of anonymized payments from around 28 million American consumers. It indicates a slow but steady erosion of the dominance that ChatGPT holds in the consumer market for paid chatbots.
Indagari's data covers weekly transactions from 2025 up to May 10, 2026, including payments for subscriptions as well as those for API tokens. However, it does not allow for the reconstruction of Anthropic's absolute numbers and entirely excludes the enterprise business and free plan users. Essentially, it measures a trend, namely the expansion of Claude's paying segment. The actual size, however, remains unknown.
The trajectory has not waned after the peak in March 2026, which stemmed from Anthropic's public refusal to allow the use of its models for mass surveillance and for lethal autonomous operations. Since that moment, the curve has continued to rise, indicating that the effect was not a one-time spike related to current events.
The DataCamp Signal
A second hint comes from the training world. On DataCamp, a platform with about 20 million users, “Claude” has become the most searched term on the entire site, even surpassing the term “AI”. Among consumers who choose their own courses, the demand for training on Claude exceeds that of ChatGPT by a three-to-one ratio, and has increased by 18 times in the last 30 days.
ChatGPT, however, remains far ahead in total paying users, and courses dedicated to ChatGPT continue to be much more popular in corporate training on DataCamp. It should be noted that most of Claude's new subscribers fall under the lowest tier, Pro, at $20 a month, compared to $100 or $200 per month for higher plans: the growth is broad at the base, likely driven by those wanting to experience the more advanced features of Anthropic’s offering without overspending.
The Background: Valuation and Constraints
The data is of particular interest as both companies prepare for their public listings. Anthropic has confidentially filed documentation for its IPO at an estimated valuation of about $965 billion, and OpenAI is also moving towards the market. Furthermore, there is a recent regulatory constraint: the U.S. government has prohibited the use of the models Mythos 5 and Fable 5, focused on cybersecurity, by non-American users, prompting Anthropic to withdraw them from the market for now.
Anthropic has not commented on Indagari's data and has never made its subscriber numbers public. As long as the company remains silent on this front, indirect analyses like the one based on credit card transactions remain the only tool to estimate how quickly Claude is regaining ground in the segment where ChatGPT still prevails.