Credit card transaction analytics firm Indagari, which tracks anonymous billing data from roughly 28 million US consumers, reports that paid individual users and revenue (including subscriptions and API tokens) for Anthropic's Claude model have grown by about 75% since January 2026. This signals that beyond finding a niche in enterprise and startup developers (like those using Claude Code), Claude is breaking into the broader consumer market. Notably, after a consumer growth spike in March when Anthropic refused the Trump administration's request to use its models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, the upward momentum has continued.
Data from online learning platform DataCamp, which has about 20 million users, further confirms Claude's popularity among everyday users. Since early 2026, interest in Claude-related courses has exploded, with "Claude" surpassing "AI" as the most searched term on the site. Among self-directed individual learners, demand for Claude courses outpaces ChatGPT courses by a 3-to-1 margin, and demand for Claude courses has surged 18-fold in the past 30 days alone. However, in the corporate training market, ChatGPT courses remain significantly more popular.
Despite Claude's impressive growth, ChatGPT still holds an absolute dominance in the personal market. Multi-platform data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shows that while ChatGPT's recent growth has been relatively muted due to its massive base and high market penetration, its total paid users and overall user base still far exceed Claude's. Even so, Claude's momentum in consumer sales and mindshare is becoming impossible to ignore.
Both companies are on the verge of going public, and the battle for consumer data will directly impact how investors judge the sustainability of their business models. This is especially critical given that earlier this month, the US government banned non-US users from accessing Anthropic's most powerful cybersecurity models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, making its resilient consumer growth even more significant.