[Digital Today reporter Yoonseo Lee (이윤서)] Anthropic's Claude is rapidly increasing its share of the paid subscription market.

On June 25 (local time), TechCrunch reported that Indagari data from a credit-card transaction analysis provider showed monthly gains in Claude's number of paid subscribers and related revenue in 2026. Revenue in that segment rose about 75 percent from January. The analysis reflected weekly transactions and subscription payments, and API token purchases from 2025 through May 10, 2026.

This trend is seen as a sign that Claude is expanding beyond demand that has been known to be centered on corporate and startup developers to reach general paying users. Indagari analyzes billions of anonymised credit-card transactions from about 28 million U.S. consumers. It does not directly show absolute revenue or total customer counts, but it is a sufficient sample to track payment trends.

After consumer growth jumped sharply once in March, the upward trend continued. At the time, Anthropic had not allowed its model to be used for large-scale surveillance of Americans by the Trump administration or for autonomous weapons.

Rising consumer interest also showed up in education-platform data. On DataCamp, which has about 20 million users, interest related to Claude surged this year and Claude has become the most searched term on the site. In corporate education, ChatGPT courses remain more popular, but among consumers who study independently, demand for Claude courses is growing three times faster than for ChatGPT. Over the past 30 days, demand for Claude courses rose 18-fold.

That does not mean leadership in the consumer market has changed. ChatGPT remains the most widely used AI service on all fronts, and Sensor Tower data also said that while Claude is growing across platforms this year, there is still a wide gap with ChatGPT in terms of scale. Indagari data also showed ChatGPT's growth rate has recently slowed somewhat, but the number of paid subscribers itself was far higher.

Even so, it is clear that Claude has begun to chase ChatGPT this year in terms of subscription payments, name recognition and interest. The data show a trend in which Anthropic's business base is expanding beyond enterprise tools to include individual paying users.

At the same time, friction with the U.S. government remains a variable for how it may affect business. Earlier this month, the U.S. government barred Anthropic from providing its high-performance cybersecurity-focused models Mythos 5 and Fable 5 to non-U.S. users. Anthropic consequently removed the models from the market for the time being.

Even so, multiple indicators confirmed so far point to Anthropic sustaining growth among both consumers and corporate users. The gap with ChatGPT remains large, but the rise in both payments and learning demand shows the competitive landscape in the consumer AI market is gradually diversifying.