Anthropic’s Claude has been quietly building a paying consumer base that goes well beyond its reputation as a tool for developers and enterprise teams. According to TechCrunch, credit card transaction data from Indagari, a firm that analyzes spending patterns across roughly 28 million U.S. consumers, shows Claude’s paying user count and revenue growing steadily month over month. Since January 2026, that figure is up about 75%.
That matters because Claude has generally been seen as a product for technical users: software developers, AI researchers, and startups building on top of its API. If the Indagari data reflects a real shift, it suggests Anthropic is making headway with everyday consumers who are choosing to pay for AI, not just professionals who bill it to a company account.
The picture is still far from complete. Indagari’s data covers weekly transactions from 2025 through May 10, 2026, and includes subscription payments and API token purchases. It can’t tell us Anthropic’s total revenue or exact subscriber count. But the sample is large enough to show clear direction, and that direction is upward.
The growth held up even after a political flashpoint in March, when Anthropic publicly refused to let its models be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons programs. That decision triggered a spike in new users, which could have been a one-time bump. Instead, the momentum continued after that spike faded, suggesting the growth was not purely driven by a protest moment.
The education platform DataCamp adds more weight to the trend. The company, which teaches AI skills to around 20 million users, says “Claude” is now the most searched term on its site, ranking above even the word “AI.” Among self-directed learners choosing their own courses, demand for Claude content is outpacing ChatGPT courses three to one. In the 30 days before TechCrunch’s reporting, demand for Claude courses on the platform increased 18 times over.
That said, the broader market picture keeps things in perspective. Data from Sensor Tower shows Claude growing across platforms this year, but still trailing ChatGPT by a significant margin in total users and downloads. Indagari’s data also confirms ChatGPT retains far more paying consumers overall. OpenAI’s lead is substantial, even if its recent growth rate appears more modest, partly because it already has an enormous installed base to grow from.
The timing of all this matters. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are widely expected to go public, and investors will want to understand the actual shape of their businesses before putting money in. Consumer revenue is a key part of that picture, because it tends to be more stable and predictable than enterprise contracts, which can be large but lumpy.
There is also a cloud hanging over Anthropic’s near-term numbers. Earlier in June, the U.S. government banned non-Americans from accessing Anthropic’s two most powerful cybersecurity-focused models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5. Anthropic responded by pulling both models from the market entirely for now. The full impact of that decision on revenue and user trust is still unknown.
What the available data does show is that Anthropic’s consumer story is no longer just a side note to its enterprise business. Whether the growth holds through ongoing regulatory friction is the question worth watching. Anthropic declined to comment on the data.
