Anthropic’s Claude took 29.4% of UK consumer spending on AI subscriptions in July, a sharp climb from 7.4% in December 2025. Over the same seven months, OpenAI’s ChatGPT slipped from 73.5% to 52.5% of that spending. The figures come from a working paper published Thursday that tracked real payments rather than survey answers.

The paper, “Who Pays for AI?”, was written by three economists. Nikhil Datta and Peter John Lambert are at the University of Warwick, and Patrick Schneider is at Imperial Business School. They relied on de-identified records from 14.2 million UK accounts, supplied by a financial data aggregator.

The scale of the market is larger than many people might assume. At July’s rate, UK adults spend about £1.07 billion a year on AI assistants. In June, 5.1% of adults paid for one, roughly 2.8 million people. A year earlier, the share was 2.3%.

Lambert told Bloomberg that the growth stood out to him. “The first thing that surprised me is just the sheer volume of everything,” he said. He called it “unheard of” for a paid consumer technology to reach millions of adults this fast.

Claude subscribers spend more

Claude’s gain is partly a story about price. The paper found that 6.2% of Claude subscribers pay for plans costing £80 or more a month. Among ChatGPT subscribers, the share is 0.3%.

ChatGPT still has far more paying customers, though. It held 71.2% of active assistant subscribers in July, compared with 27.1% for Claude. Google’s Gemini accounted for 5.1% of spending, down from 5.8%.

The study has limits, and the authors’ caveats matter for reading the numbers. It counts only subscriptions that people pay for themselves, not licenses that employers buy for staff. It counts accounts rather than individual people. It also estimates app store payments it cannot see directly. When those estimated payments are included, Claude’s share of July spending falls to 22.8%.

Who is paying

Who is paying for AI assistants in the UK?

The people paying for AI assistants skew young, male, well paid and urban. Adults in their 20s were nearly five times as likely as those over 60 to have ever paid for one, a gap that persisted after the researchers adjusted for income, sex and region. Men were 27% more likely to pay than women.

London had the highest share of paying users, and the North East had the lowest. By occupation, IT professionals led at 20.3%. Social care workers had the lowest share, at 1.7%.

The study lands as both companies move toward public markets. Anthropic’s amended IPO filing shows $17 billion in revenue. On Wednesday, OpenAI president Greg Brockman said the company should be ready for an IPO in 2027.

Speaking at the WSJ Tech conference, Brockman said OpenAI had a “pretty rough” first half in coding, according to The Wall Street Journal. He said the company’s new tools turned that around in the third quarter.

OpenAI is also pointing to ChatGPT’s reach. The service now has 1.2 billion weekly users, up from 1 billion two months earlier. Adam Fry, its consumer product lead, gave the figure to Big Technology on Monday.

Is Claude gaining on ChatGPT in the UK?

In the UK, though, ChatGPT still takes more than half of consumer AI spending and has nearly three in four paying subscribers. Claude’s rapid climb has narrowed the gap, but the paper shows it has not closed it.

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