Anthropic's Claude gains 75% in paid consumer revenue as ChatGPT slips

Anthropic's Claude has grown paid consumer revenue about 75% since January, eroding ChatGPT's once-uncontested hold on the consumer AI market, credit card transaction data shows.

"People aren't just experimenting anymore — they're building workflows around specific products for specific use cases," Tom Grant, vice president of research at Apptopia, said.

Indagari, which analyzes billions of anonymized credit card transactions from about 28 million US consumers, tracked Claude's paying user base and revenue climbing month by month through May 10. The gains accelerated after Anthropic publicly refused to let its models be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons by the Trump administration in March — a stance that pushed Claude to No. 1 on the US App Store that same month, Sensor Tower data shows. On DataCamp, an online education platform with about 20 million users, "Claude" is now the most searched term, surpassing "AI" itself, and demand for Claude courses has increased 18x in the last 30 days.

The shift carries implications for both companies as they approach potential public listings. Claude converts 13% of users to paid subscriptions, the highest rate among major AI assistants, and its average revenue per user on US mobile climbed from less than $0.50 in September to $2.76 in May, Sensor Tower data shows. ChatGPT's share of global AI chatbot users slipped to 46.4% by the end of May, down from above 50% in March, as Google's Gemini (27.7%) and Claude (10.3%) absorbed the remainder.

Distribution Deals Reshape the Competitive Map

Apple's decision to open Siri to third-party AI providers with iOS 27 — letting users choose ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude as the default assistant — could accelerate the fragmentation. With more than 2.35 billion active Apple devices worldwide, the feature represents one of the largest distribution opportunities yet for AI companies. Bloomberg has reported that Apple's long-term plan extends to include Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, Grok and Meta AI, positioning Siri as the interface while third-party systems handle responses in the background.

The distribution shift extends to commerce. PYMNTS Intelligence data shows 60% of AI users turn to ChatGPT for shopping while 57% use Gemini for the same tasks — a narrow gap that suggests consumers are building multi-tool workflows rather than committing to a single platform. ChatGPT still leads on raw users with 1.1 billion monthly active users, but its share of AI chatbot web traffic has fallen from 86.7% in January 2025 to 56.7% by March 2026.

Trust and Monetization Diverge

Brand positioning has become a measurable competitive variable. OpenAI's deal with the US Department of Defense in February triggered a spike in uninstalls, TechCrunch reported, while Claude reached No. 1 on the US App Store the same month Anthropic declined a similar military contract. The divergence extends to monetization strategy: Claude's 13% paid conversion rate leads the industry, while OpenAI has begun testing advertising — 17% of ChatGPT daily users were served ads by May — alongside its subscription tiers.

For investors, the key question is whether Claude's higher conversion rate and revenue-per-user growth can offset ChatGPT's massive user base. Anthropic declined to comment on the Indagari data.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.