Claude now takes 29% of UK AI subscription spending, up from 7% in December

UK consumers spend more than £1 billion a year on AI subscriptions, and Anthropic is closing in on OpenAI, Bloomberg reported. A new working paper puts Claude’s share at 29.4% in July, up from 7.4% in December.

Claude quadruples its share in seven months

The research comes from a working paper titled “Who Pays for AI?”, dated November 2026. Its authors are Nikhil Datta and Peter John Lambert of the University of Warwick and the London School of Economics, and Patrick Schneider of Imperial Business School. They measured paid AI adoption from de-identified open banking and card payment data. The data covers a panel of millions of accounts from 2022 to mid-2026. According to the paper’s project page, it spans billions of transactions.

For direct subscription spending, the paper reports these shares:

• ChatGPT: 73.5% in December 2025, 52.5% in July 2026
• Claude: 7.4% in December 2025, 29.4% in July 2026

The authors describe ChatGPT’s share as having fallen by about 21 percentage points, while Claude’s roughly quadrupled. Subtracting the published figures, ChatGPT’s lead over Claude shrank from 66.1 points to 23.1 points in the period. ChatGPT still takes the largest share of money, but the gap is far narrower than it was.

Who is paying, and for which plans

The paper says 5.1% of UK adults, about 2.8 million people, paid for AI by June 2026. It adds that paid adoption has roughly doubled every 12 months since early 2024. Nearly nine-tenths of the growth in spending between January 2024 and July 2026 came from more people paying, not from existing subscribers paying more.

The pattern is uneven. Adoption among younger adults is about five to six times the rate for people aged 60 and over, and men are 28% more likely to pay than women. Adoption ranges from around 20% of IT professionals to under 3% of electricians, nurses and social care workers. London has 78 paid users per 1,000 adults, against 46 elsewhere in the UK.

The paper ties part of Claude’s rise to technical and professional users who buy the most expensive plans. It reports that 6.2% of Claude subscribers pay £80 or more per month, compared with 0.3% of ChatGPT subscribers. Spending share and subscriber share are therefore different measures: a provider with fewer subscribers can still take a large slice of the money if its customers choose higher tiers.

Spending share is not the same as users

The figures need careful reading. Spending share measures money, not people, and the paper’s data is limited to what shows up in bank and card records. A secondary report on the paper, from FourWeekMBA, says app store subscriptions are excluded from the provider shares because bank records do not name the product, and that the authors estimate app store spending rather than observe it. That report also says some card issuers hide the Claude name. The project page does not spell out these limits, so they remain a secondary reading. If correct, they would mean the provider shares cover direct web and card payments only.

ChatGPT’s overall reach is a separate matter. In a Techmeme summary of a Big Technology report on November 3, ChatGPT’s consumer product lead Adam Fry was said to have put ChatGPT at 1.2 billion weekly active users, 200 million more than two months earlier. Those are global usage figures, not UK payments, and the two sets of numbers cannot be compared directly. The UK study says only that Claude’s share of paid spending has grown quickly.

The paper is a working paper, so it has not been through peer review. It covers the UK only and runs to July 2026. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is quoted in the material available, so there is no company comment on the findings.

Pricier plans help explain Claude’s faster money share

The result sits alongside Anthropic’s push on other fronts. In October, it began offering governments 40% off Claude with no minimum spend, and it has been the subject of reports about a share offer tied to its IPO. The UK data suggests that on the consumer side, willingness to pay for higher-priced tiers is one reason revenue share can move faster than user numbers.

For UK readers, the market is still young: roughly one adult in twenty pays for AI. The paper’s own conclusion is that the number of payers, not the price per payer, is driving most of the growth. Whether Claude can hold its July share, or ChatGPT recovers, is something the data to July 2026 cannot answer.