Consumers paying for artificial intelligence are increasingly choosing Claude by Anthropic, according to trend data from the credit card transaction analytics company Examine can be seen.
This is a sign that the AI lab has a broader and healthier customer base than the niche that is commonly thought of as managed – enterprise and startup developers using Claude Code.
Indagari analyzes billions of anonymous credit card transactions from approximately 28 million U.S. consumers. While this data cannot give us absolute numbers on Anthropic’s revenue or total customer numbers, it is a vast enough sample size to detect trends.
In the case of Anthropic, the trend is upward and to the right.
The data we analyzed covers weekly transactions from 2025 to May 10, 2026 and includes payments for items such as subscriptions and API tokens. Shows Claude paying consumers and revenue growing month over month, currently up approximately 75% in this segment as of January 2026.
Notably, the gains continued even after the company saw consumer prices soar in March when it denied the Trump administration’s exploit of its models for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons.
Another indicator of Claude’s growing popularity among consumers is DataCamp, an online learning platform that teaches consumers and business employees artificial intelligence skills that has about 20 million users, he says.
Consumer interest in Claude has exploded on DataCamp since the beginning of the year. “Claude” is now the most searched term on the site, even more than the term “AI,” DataCamp tells TechCrunch.
While ChatGPT courses continue to be much more popular among corporate training companies, demand for Claude courses outweighs three to one among self-education consumers, the company says. According to her, demand for Claude courses has increased 18-fold in the last 30 days.
Even though Claude’s growth is impressive, ChatGPT is still by far the most popular AI among consumers, by any measure.
For example, the latest data from a market research company Sensory Tower shows that Claude is growing well this year on all platforms, but is still far behind ChatGPT.
While data shows that ChatGPT’s growth has been more modest recently (largely due to its already massive reach), Indagari’s data shows that it still has many more paying users.
However, there is no doubt that Claude has started to gain on ChatGPT this year in terms of dollars raised from consumers, as well as overall consumer awareness and interest.
With both OpenAI and Anthropic on the cusp of becoming public companies, we can’t wait to take a look at the legs supporting their businesses.
It’s especially unclear what impact Anthropic’s latest battle with the U.S. government will have on its business. Earlier this month, the government banned Anthropic from allowing its most powerful cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, to be used by non-Americans, causing the AI lab to completely withdraw them from the market for now.
However, so far, every look at the data we can find shows that Anthropic continues to grow among both consumer and business/enterprise users.
Anthropic declined to comment.