Claude gains UK AI subscription spending share as ChatGPT slips
A study of bank and card records found ChatGPT remained ahead in paying subscribers, while Claude had a larger proportion on higher-priced plans.
Anthropic’s Claude accounted for 29.4% of spending by UK consumers on AI subscriptions in July, compared with 7.4% in December 2025, a new working paper found. ChatGPT’s spending share declined over that period, reaching 52.5% from 73.5%.
The findings have limits: the researchers examined subscriptions purchased by consumers themselves, excluding employer-funded licenses. They counted accounts, not individuals, and estimated payments through app stores that were not directly visible. Including those estimates puts Claude’s July spending share at 22.8%.
ChatGPT retained the larger subscriber base, accounting for 71.2% of active assistant subscribers in July, while Claude had 27.1%. Gemini, Google’s assistant, represented 5.1% of spending, compared with 5.8% previously.
Higher-priced subscriptions partly explain Claude’s spending gains, according to the paper. Among its subscribers, 6.2% bought plans priced at £80 or more per month. The equivalent proportion for ChatGPT was 0.3%.
The study put annual spending by UK adults on AI assistants at about £1.07 billion using July’s rate. In June, 5.1% of adults, or about 2.8 million people, paid for an assistant, compared with 2.3% a year earlier.
The working paper, Who Pays for AI?, draws on de-identified records covering 14.2 million UK accounts provided by a financial data aggregator. Its authors are University of Warwick economists Nikhil Datta and Peter John Lambert, and Patrick Schneider of Imperial Business School.
