Claude is getting consumers to spend real money on AI
ChatGPT and Claude look like the same product. They’re becoming very different businesses.
Hello hello! It’s Dan Frommer, back with The New Consumer, and just back from a quick weekend TGV trip to Basel with my son. Go check out the Vitra campus and design museum if it’s ever convenient — a great example of a company using its land to host customers and community with neat architecture and public spaces, not just shoo them into a corny tour and a gift shop full of bad merch.
Also, two quick plugs: I spoke with Sally Ekus, the food and lifestyle literary agent, about cookbooks and how they intersect with recent trends in eating, drinking, and brand-building. I also joined the Marketing Meeting podcast with Itir Eraslan to talk about some of our recent Consumer Trends research — protein preferences, GLP-1s, and more.
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Claude, the AI service owned by Anthropic, has a fraction of ChatGPT’s paid users, but its users are spending dramatically more on a per-user basis — and the gap is widening.
Today, millions of American consumers pay for an AI subscription, primarily ChatGPT, which is owned by OpenAI. Claude has been a distant follower.
But around the end of last year, something started to shift. Claude hit an inflection point in paid consumer spending, according to transaction data from Consumer Edge, which tracks US consumer credit and debit card purchases.
