Consumers who pay for artificial intelligence services have been gravitating toward Anthropic’s Claude in growing numbers, according to trend data from Indagari, a company that analyzes credit card transactions. This suggests the AI lab has a broader and healthier customer base than the niche it’s typically associated with—namely, enterprise clients and startup developers who use Claude Code. Indagari examines billions of anonymized credit card transactions from roughly 28 million U.S. consumers. While this data can’t provide exact figures on Anthropic’s revenue or total customer count, the sample is large enough to identify meaningful patterns. And in Anthropic’s case, the trend is clearly upward.

The data, which covers weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, includes payments for items such as subscriptions and API tokens. It reveals that Claude’s paying consumer base and revenue have grown month over month, currently up about 75% since January 2026 among this segment. Notably, this growth continued even after the company experienced a spike in consumer interest in March, when it refused to allow its models to be used by the Trump Administration for mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous weapons.

Another sign of Claude’s rising popularity with consumers comes from DataCamp, an online education platform that teaches AI skills to both consumers and business employees, with about 20 million users, according to the company. Interest in Claude among DataCamp’s consumers has surged since the start of the year. While ChatGPT courses remain far more popular for corporate training programs, among self-directed consumers, demand for Claude courses is outpacing ChatGPT by three to one, the company reports. Demand for Claude courses has increased 18-fold in the last 30 days alone.

Nevertheless, despite Claude’s impressive growth, ChatGPT remains the dominant AI choice among consumers by every measure. For example, recent data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shows that Claude has grown well across all platforms this year, but it still trails far behind ChatGPT.

While ChatGPT’s growth has been more modest recently—largely due to its already enormous reach—it still has significantly more paying users, according to Indagari’s data.

Yet there’s no doubt that Claude has started to close the gap with ChatGPT this year in terms of revenue from consumers, as well as overall consumer awareness and interest.

As both OpenAI and Anthropic approach the threshold of becoming public companies, there’s keen interest in understanding the foundations of their businesses. It remains especially unclear what impact Anthropic’s latest conflict with the U.S. government will have on its operations. Earlier this month, the government prohibited Anthropic from allowing its most powerful, cybersecurity-focused models—Mythos 5 and Fable 5—to be used by non-Americans, prompting the AI lab to withdraw them from the market entirely for now. So far, however, every data point we’ve examined shows Anthropic continuing to grow its consumer and business/enterprise user base. Anthropic declined to comment.