Disclosure: Anthropic, the maker of Claude, also makes the AI model used to help produce Boursel. We cover it as we would any company — with sources and without favor.
For three years, the paying-consumer market for AI chatbots has been ChatGPT's to lose. New data suggests a rival is starting to chip away at it.
What the data shows
Anthropic's Claude grew its paying U.S. customers and revenue by about 75% between January and early May 2026, TechCrunch reported, citing the credit-card transaction firm Indagari, which tracks spending across more than 25 million U.S. consumers. Anthropic declined to comment on the figures.
Two caveats are essential. First, ChatGPT still has far more paying consumers in absolute terms; Claude is growing from a much smaller base, which makes high percentage gains easier. Second, both companies are private and disclose no official subscriber numbers, so every figure here is a third-party estimate, not audited data.
Context: a market ChatGPT built
OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022 and effectively invented the consumer AI-subscription category, building the largest such audience in the world. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, made its name in enterprise and developer markets, where Claude earned a reputation for coding and writing. Its consumer subscription tier came later, and the new data suggests that enterprise-bred reputation is now pulling individual users who want the same capabilities for personal use.
A separate demand signal: the education platform DataCamp said "Claude" is now its most-searched term, ahead of the generic query "AI," and that among self-directed learners paying out of pocket, demand for Claude courses runs well ahead of ChatGPT courses — though corporate-training demand still favors ChatGPT, per TechCrunch. The broader category is booming regardless of who leads: generative-AI apps drew 3.8 billion downloads and more than $5 billion in in-app spending in 2025, according to Sensor Tower.
Why it matters
Consumer subscriptions are valuable because the revenue is recurring and diversified, unlike enterprise API income concentrated among a few big clients. With both Anthropic and OpenAI reported to be eyeing eventual public offerings, demonstrating durable consumer growth carries strategic weight.
But the data does not show ChatGPT losing ground — only growing more slowly off a vastly larger base, the arithmetic of any market leader. And the panels behind these estimates have limits: Indagari's is U.S.-only, Sensor Tower's figures are modeled, and DataCamp's audience skews technical. The fair read is narrow but real: in the paid-consumer slice that one transaction panel can see, a second credible player is gaining — a sign the consumer AI market is becoming a contest rather than a coronation. Whether that holds as both firms add features and adjust prices is the open question.
