Claude's UK share quadruples as paid AI tops £1bn a year

Claude's share of UK consumer spending on AI subscriptions quadrupled from 7.4% in December 2025 to 29.4% in July 2026, while ChatGPT's share fell from 73.5% to 52.5% over the same seven months, Bloomberg reports, citing a working paper built from de-identified records of 14.2 million UK bank and card accounts.

The paper, "Who Pays for AI?" by Nikhil Datta, Peter John Lambert and Patrick Schneider of the University of Warwick, the London School of Economics and Imperial College London, estimates UK adults are now spending about £1.07 billion a year on AI assistants at July's rate. Some 5.1% of UK adults, about 2.8 million people, held an active paid AI subscription in June 2026, up from 2.3% a year earlier.

Claude's revenue share runs well ahead of its subscriber share, which the paper puts at 27.1% against ChatGPT's 71.2%. The gap is price tier: 6.2% of active Claude subscribers paid at least £80 per month, compared with 0.3% of ChatGPT subscribers. Average monthly spend per paying user rose from £22 to £28 over the window.

"The first thing that surprised me is just the sheer volume of everything," Lambert told Bloomberg, on how quickly paid AI has moved from novelty to a measurable consumer category. Gemini's share sits at 5.1%, with other products accounting for 13.0%. The sample covers about 8 million transactions a week between January 2022 and August 2026.