Claude's paid personal user base has surged by 75%, closing in on ChatGPT

According to Sentinel Beat monitoring, credit card transaction analytics company Indagari, tracking anonymous bill data from about 28 million U.S. consumers, has revealed that since January 2026, the number of paid individual users and revenue of Anthropic's Claude model (including subscriptions and API tokens) have cumulatively increased by approximately 75%. This indicates that in addition to establishing a presence in enterprises and among early-stage developers (such as the group using Claude Code), Claude is accelerating its penetration into the broader individual consumer market. It is noteworthy that after Anthropic experienced a surge in consumer growth in March of this year due to its refusal to allow the Trump administration to use the model for large-scale surveillance and autonomous weapons, this upward momentum is still ongoing.

Data from the online education platform DataCamp (with approximately 20 million users) further confirms the popularity of Claude among ordinary users. Since the beginning of 2026, interest in Claude-related courses on the platform has seen explosive growth, with "Claude" surpassing "AI" itself as the most searched term on the website. Among self-directed individual learners, demand for Claude courses has overwhelmed ChatGPT courses by a ratio of 3:1, and in the past 30 days alone, demand for Claude courses has surged by 18 times. However, in the corporate training market, the popularity of ChatGPT courses still remains significantly ahead.

Despite Claude's impressive growth, ChatGPT still holds absolute dominance in the individual market. Multi-platform data from market intelligence company Sensor Tower indicates that while ChatGPT's recent growth appears relatively flat due to its large user base and high market penetration rate, its total number of paid users and overall user base still far exceed Claude's. Nevertheless, Claude's momentum in consumer sales and user mindset in catching up to ChatGPT cannot be underestimated.

Both companies are currently on the verge of going public, and the consumer-side data battle will directly influence investors' assessment of their business model sustainability, especially considering earlier this month when the U.S. government banned non-U.S. users from accessing Anthropic's most powerful network security models (Mythos 5 and Fable 5), making their consumer-side resilient growth performance even more critical.