British consumers now spend more than £1 billion a year on their own AI subscriptions, and the money is moving. Anthropic’s Claude took 29% of UK consumer spending on AI subscriptions in July, up from 7% last December, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT fell from 74% to 53% over the same seven months. The figures come from a study of 14.2 million anonymised UK bank and card accounts by economists at the University of Warwick and Imperial Business School. One in twenty UK adults now pays for an AI tool, and subscriber numbers have roughly doubled every year.
## What the study found
The market is now worth about £1.07 billion a year at July’s spending rate, with 5.1% of UK adults — roughly 2.8 million people — paying for an AI assistant in June. That is about double the share a year earlier. More adults are now signing up for AI subscriptions than for Netflix, Spotify or Disney+, the researchers say.
Claude’s rise is a spending story, not a headcount story. ChatGPT still holds 71.2% of active assistant subscribers in Britain, against 27.1% for Claude. But Claude’s users spend far more: 6.2% of them pay for plans costing £80 or more a month, compared with 0.3% of ChatGPT subscribers. Google’s Gemini took 5.1% of spending, down from 5.8% in December.
## Why Claude is winning the wallet
The gap comes down to who pays for the expensive tiers. Claude’s priciest plans cost $100 and $200 a month, and its users skew toward technical and professional work, where power users pay for heavy use. Anthropic has also pushed Claude beyond chat, adding a read-only [personal finance tool](https://geroundtable.com/claude-personal-finance-launch/) and an enterprise app store.
ChatGPT’s lead rests on reach. OpenAI says the chatbot now has [1.2 billion weekly users](https://geroundtable.com/chatgpt-search-fifth-google-volume/). Most of its paying users sit on the $20 Plus plan, so its revenue per subscriber is far lower. That breadth is a strength — but it also means OpenAI earns less from each customer than Anthropic does.
## The caveats
The figures carry limits the authors flag themselves. The study counts only subscriptions people buy for themselves, not licences employers pay for, and it counts accounts rather than individuals. Payments through app stores are estimated, not observed directly — and once those estimates are included, Claude’s July share of spending drops from 29.4% to 22.8%.
## Our Read
The headline is not that ChatGPT is losing — it still takes most of the money and nearly three in four paying subscribers. The headline is that Claude has found the customers willing to pay serious money. A 29% spending share built on $100 and $200 plans is a different business from a 53% share built on $20 plans.
That matters because both companies are heading for the stock market. Anthropic [filed for its IPO](https://geroundtable.com/anthropic-ipo-investor-doubts-valuation/) in late October, and OpenAI’s president has said the company [should be ready to list in 2027](https://geroundtable.com/openai-ipo-ready-2027-enterprise-revenue/). Investors will judge them on revenue per user as much as on user counts — and on that measure, Claude’s expensive-tier customers are the more valuable prize.
The UK is also a useful early indicator. Its consumers adopted paid AI almost as fast as Americans, and well ahead of the European Union, according to separate research from Stripe. If Claude’s premium-first model keeps winning share there, the same pattern is likely to show up in other English-speaking markets next.
## Why It Matters
This is the first hard evidence of how the AI assistant race is actually being paid for. Free users make headlines; paying users make businesses. Claude’s surge shows that a smaller, pricier rival can take real revenue share without winning the user count — and that changes how both companies will price, build and sell their assistants from here.
## Background
Claude’s year has been one of steady expansion: a new flagship model in Opus 5.5, an [enterprise app store](https://geroundtable.com/claude-enterprise-app-store/), and a personal finance tool that reads bank accounts. Anthropic says Claude now [writes most of its own code](https://geroundtable.com/claude-writes-90-percent-anthropic-code/), and the company filed to go public in October.
Source: [Warwick’s study announcement](https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/05-11-26-uk_consumer_spending_on_ai_now_over_1_billion_per_year_new_study_finds/) and [Bloomberg’s report](http://www.theedgesingapore.com/news/tech/claude-lowers-chatgpts-lead-us14-bil-uk-consumer-ai-market)
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