Credit card transaction data from Indagari indicates that consumers who pay for AI services are increasingly opting for Anthropic’s Claude. This trend suggests that the AI lab is attracting a broader and more diverse customer base than previously thought, beyond its traditional enterprise and startup developer audiences. Indagari analyzes billions of anonymized credit card transactions from approximately 28 million U.S. consumers, providing a large enough sample to identify trends. The data covers weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, and includes payments for items like subscriptions and API tokens. It shows Claude’s paying consumers and revenue growing month by month, currently up about 75% since January 2026 among this segment.
Another indicator of Claude’s growing popularity comes from DataCamp, an online education platform with about 20 million users. Interest in Claude among consumers on DataCamp has surged since the start of the year. 'Claude' is now the most searched term on its site, even more than the term 'AI,' according to DataCamp. While ChatGPT courses remain more popular with businesses doing corporate training, demand for Claude courses is outpacing ChatGPT by three to one among self-directed consumers. The company reports that demand for Claude courses has increased 18 times in the last 30 days alone.
Despite these gains, ChatGPT remains the most popular AI with consumers, as indicated by recent data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. While Claude has been growing well this year across all platforms, it is still significantly behind ChatGPT. Indagari data also suggests that ChatGPT has many more paying users, though its growth has been more modest recently due to its already massive reach. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that Claude has started to gain on ChatGPT this year in terms of dollars collected from consumers, as well as general consumer awareness and interest.
Source: techcrunch
