Anthropic’s Claude is up about 75% in paying consumers and revenue since January 2026, according to credit card transaction data analyzed by TechCrunch AI and the spending-analytics firm Indagari. That number matters because it pokes a hole in a common assumption: that Claude is mostly a developer tool, beloved by enterprise engineers running Claude Code but a non-factor in the consumer market that ChatGPT dominates. The data says otherwise. Claude is winning over real, paying everyday users, and it’s doing it month after month.
Here’s what stands out. Indagari tracks billions of anonymized transactions from roughly 28 million U.S. consumers, so it can’t tell us Anthropic’s exact revenue. But it’s a big enough sample to read the direction of travel. And the direction is up and to the right, covering weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026.
The numbers behind the trend
A few data points from the TechCrunch AI report worth sitting with:
- Claude’s paying consumers and revenue are up roughly 75% since January 2026 in this segment.
- The growth held even after a March spike, when Anthropic refused to let its models be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
- On DataCamp, the AI-skills education platform with about 20 million users, “Claude” is now the most searched term on the site, ahead of even “AI.”
- Among self-directed consumers on DataCamp, demand for Claude courses is outpacing ChatGPT by three to one, and course demand jumped 18x in the last 30 days.
That DataCamp signal is the one I’d watch closest. Search behavior and course enrollment are leading indicators. People learn the tool they plan to use. When consumers go looking to skill up on Claude faster than on anything else, that tends to show up in paid conversions later.
ChatGPT still owns the market
Let’s keep this honest. Claude is gaining, but ChatGPT is still far and away the most popular consumer AI by every measure. Sensor Tower data cited by TechCrunch AI shows Claude growing well across platforms this year, yet still a long way behind. ChatGPT has many more paying users, and its slower recent growth rate is mostly a math problem: when you’re already that big, percentage gains get harder.
So the story isn’t “Claude is overtaking ChatGPT.” It’s “Claude has become a genuine second pole in a market most people assumed was a one-horse race.” For a company often boxed in as a developer favorite, that’s a meaningful shift in narrative.
Why it matters now
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are inching toward going public. That makes the health of their consumer businesses, not just their enterprise contracts, suddenly very relevant to investors trying to value them. Diversified revenue across consumers, developers, and enterprise is exactly the kind of foundation public markets reward.
There’s a wildcard, too. Earlier this month the U.S. government banned Anthropic from letting non-Americans use its most powerful cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, prompting the lab to pull them from the market for now. What that does to revenue is still unclear. But so far, every data set TechCrunch AI could find shows Anthropic still growing on both the consumer and enterprise sides. Anthropic declined to comment.
Practical takeaways
If you build with or sell AI, here’s what to do with this:
- Don’t treat Claude as developer-only. Consumer demand is real and climbing. If your audience is self-directed learners or prosumers, Claude content and integrations are worth testing now.
- Follow the education signal. Course demand and search trends front-run purchases. Track what your users are trying to learn, not just what they’re buying today.
- Plan for a two-model world. A single-vendor AI stack is a risk. Building for both ChatGPT and Claude hedges against pricing shifts, regulatory shocks, and sudden model pulls like the Mythos and Fable ban.
The consumer AI market is no longer ChatGPT and everyone else. It’s ChatGPT and a fast-closing Claude, with regulation now a live variable for both. Full details are at the original TechCrunch AI report.