Bloomberg reported at 00:01 UTC on Thursday, 5 November, that “UK consumers are spending over £1 billion ($1.4 billion) a year on artificial intelligence subscriptions, with Anthropic eating into OpenAI’s lead, research showed on Thursday.” The research is a working paper by Nikhil Datta, Peter John Lambert and Patrick Schneider of the University of Warwick, the London School of Economics and Imperial College London, built from de-identified UK bank and card records.
The paper puts ChatGPT at 73.5% of direct UK spending on AI subscriptions in December 2025 and 52.5% in July 2026, and Claude at 7.4% and then 29.4%. By our arithmetic, ChatGPT’s lead over Claude fell from 66.1 percentage points to 23.1 points in seven months, a narrowing of 43.0 points. ChatGPT still had about 1.8 times Claude’s share in July.
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The key insight: By our arithmetic, ChatGPT’s lead over Claude in direct UK AI subscription spending fell from 66.1 percentage points in December 2025 to 23.1 points in July 2026, in the working paper Bloomberg cites.
Bloomberg’s report, by Jacob Reid and Tom Rees, says: “As of July, more than 5% of adults in Britain now pay for their own AI subscription — about double the proportion a year earlier, according to the research by academics at three universities.” It adds that the authors “based their study on analysis of 14 million UK bank and card accounts.”
The $1.4 billion in Bloomberg’s headline is its dollar conversion of the paper’s pound figure. The study’s website puts total UK spending on AI products in July 2026, including estimated app store subscriptions, at £1,600 per 1,000 adults, or £1.07 billion a year at that rate across UK adults. The paper describes the rate as “exceeding £1.0 billion”.
ChatGPT’s share of direct UK AI subscription spending minus Claude’s share, in percentage points: 69.9 in July 2025, 66.1 in December 2025 and 23.1 in July 2026. Our arithmetic from the monthly provider shares in Datta, Lambert and Schneider (2026), Who Pays for AI?, Exhibit 2 (whopaysfor.ai). Direct payments only; app store subscriptions excluded.Animated: ChatGPT’s share minus Claude’s share of direct UK AI subscription spending, monthly, January 2024 to July 2026, in percentage points (our arithmetic). Source: Datta, Lambert and Schneider (2026), Who Pays for AI?, Exhibit 2 (whopaysfor.ai).ChatGPT’s and Claude’s monthly shares of direct UK AI subscription spending, January 2024 to July 2026. Source: Datta, Lambert and Schneider (2026), Who Pays for AI?, Exhibit 2 (whopaysfor.ai). The shaded gap is ChatGPT’s lead, our arithmetic.
What the Bank Data Shows
The study’s second exhibit gives each provider’s share of AI subscription spending from direct payments, month by month. The figures for the two endpoints the paper uses:
ChatGPT: 73.5% in December 2025, 52.5% in July 2026. The paper says its share “fell by 21 percentage points”.
Claude: 7.4% in December 2025, 29.4% in July 2026. The paper says Claude’s share “quadrupled”.
Gemini: 5.8% in December 2025, 5.1% in July 2026.
Other providers: 13.3% in December 2025, 13.0% in July 2026.
On the same table, ChatGPT’s lead was 69.9 points in July 2025 (76.0% against 6.1%), by our arithmetic. The largest one-month rise in Claude’s share in the series came in March 2026, from 10.3% to 15.9%, by our arithmetic.
The authors date the shift to the period “following the release of Claude Opus 4.5 and the rapid spread of the coding tool Claude Code”.
Spending Share Is Not Subscriber Share
The paper says “ChatGPT still leads by a wide margin in active assistant subscribers (71.2 percent versus 27.1 percent in July 2026)”. That is a 44.1-point lead among assistant subscribers, by our arithmetic, against 23.1 points in direct spending. The two shares use different bases, so the gap between them is not a single measured quantity.
The paper gives the reason Claude’s spending share runs ahead of its subscriber share: “6.2 percent of its subscribers pay for £80+ monthly power-user plans, compared with just 0.3 percent on ChatGPT—a twenty-to-one gap in power-user plan uptake.”
It also says that “About a quarter of Claude’s direct spending-share gain from December 2025 to July 2026 comes from this power-user upgrading, with the remainder coming from new users”. At the standard tier, the paper finds the average monthly price paid by UK subscribers stayed at roughly £19 from early 2023 to mid-2026.
Where Claude’s Payers Came From
The paper tracks the payment history of new Claude subscribers and finds that “roughly one-fifth were former ChatGPT subscribers who had cancelled and one-seventh held an active ChatGPTsubscription when starting Claude.”
Among direct ChatGPT subscribers who cancelled, the paper says, “Throughout 2025, only 1.4% of cancelling ChatGPT subscribers switched to Claude within 60 days; between March and May 2026, that 60-day switching rate rose to 11.7%”.
Model launches moved the two companies differently in this data. The paper finds that “Major Anthropic releases are associated with a 39.5% jump in new sign-ups compared with a 10.0% average two-week increase on random comparison dates”, while OpenAI releases changed first-time sign-ups by 1.9%, against 3.4% on random dates.
OpenAI’s entry plan, ChatGPT Go at £7 to £8 a month, mostly brought in new payers, according to the paper: 70.2% of its UK buyers had never paid for an AI subscription before.
How the Study Counts
The paper uses records from a financial data aggregator covering 14.2 million accounts between January 2022 and August 2026; Bloomberg rounds this to 14 million. The site says the authors match direct payments to a registry of more than 200 AI products “using the statement text, the exact price and the product’s launch date”.
The provider shares leave out two groups. The site’s notes say: “We exclude app store subscriptions because bank records do not name the product. We also exclude accounts at card issuers whose privacy filters hide the Claude name, and re-weight the remaining accounts to represent UK adults.”
That makes the shares a measure of direct web and card payments, not of the whole £1 billion-plus market, which includes estimated app store billing. We do not apply the shares to the £1.07 billion total for that reason.
On adoption, the study’s first exhibit puts paid AI users at 50.6 per 1,000 UK adults in June 2026, or 5.1%, up from 2.3% a year earlier, and at 52.0 per 1,000 in July. The paper says this is about 2.8 million people.
Against the App Data
App estimates point the same way at a far smaller scale. Trending Topics reported on 4 November that, according to Sensor Tower estimates, monthly active users of the Claude app rose 1,260% year over year in the third quarter of 2026. In the same report, Claude had a share of about 4% of users across the seven assistants Sensor Tower compared, against 1.4 billion monthly users for ChatGPT.
The two sources measure different things: Sensor Tower’s figures are app-user estimates, and the UK paper counts British payments. As we read them together, Claude’s position looks larger in money than in users, which fits the paper’s finding on £80+ plans; the two figures do not share a base and we do not combine them.
The business lever in this story is the paid subscriber. The paper finds that Claude’s share of UK spending exceeds its share of subscribers partly because more of its payers sit on £80-plus plans, and that about a quarter of its spending-share gain came from that upgrading and the rest from new users, some of them former ChatGPT payers.
For OpenAI, the paper’s numbers show a lead that is still large in subscribers and smaller in money. For Anthropic, the paper says Claude’s surge was driven partly by users in technical and professional roles who pay for the most expensive plans.
Connecting the Coverage
Our related pieces on the assistant race and Anthropic’s numbers:
As we read the paper, Claude’s gain came from two sources at once: new payers, some of them former ChatGPT subscribers, and existing subscribers moving up to plans of £80 or more a month.
As we read the monthly table, most of the change happened in 2026: ChatGPT’s lead was still 63.9 points in January 2026 and 23.1 points by July, by our arithmetic.
As we read the method, the shares describe direct card and bank payments, so app store subscribers, who the paper says make up most ChatGPT Go buyers, sit outside the provider split.
Datta, Lambert and Schneider, Who Pays for AI? (2026)
“Claude’s share of direct consumer spending on AI subscriptions quadrupled from 7.4 percent to 29.4 percent”
Three Implications
FOR OPENAI In the paper’s data, ChatGPT keeps a 71.2% share of active assistant subscribers in July 2026, against 52.5% of direct spending.
FOR ANTHROPIC The paper finds 6.2% of Claude subscribers on £80-plus plans, against 0.3% for ChatGPT, and says about a quarter of Claude’s share gain came from that upgrading.
FOR ANYONE SIZING THE MARKET The paper’s figure for total UK spending, £1.07 billion a year at the July rate, includes estimated app store subscriptions; the provider shares do not.
The framework puts it this way: “The power user is the moat.”
As we read it, the UK bank data puts a number on that idea: 6.2% of Claude subscribers pay £80 or more a month against 0.3% of ChatGPT subscribers, and that tier is part of why Claude’s share of spending runs ahead of its share of subscribers. The framework does not discuss the UK or this study.
What Is Not Established
The study’s own page describes it as a working paper. Its provider shares cover direct payments only, exclude app store subscriptions and some card issuers, and are re-weighted to represent UK adults; the authors estimate app store subscriptions rather than observe them.
Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic is quoted in the part of Bloomberg’s report we could read. The figures cover the UK only and stop at July 2026. The 66.1, 23.1, 43.0, 69.9 and 44.1-point figures and the 1.8 times ratio are our arithmetic from the paper’s published shares.
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Bloomberg reports that UK consumers spend more than £1 billion a year on AI subscriptions, citing a working paper built on about 14 million bank and card accounts. In that paper’s data, ChatGPT’s share of direct spending fell from 73.5% to 52.5% between December 2025 and July 2026 while Claude’s rose from 7.4% to 29.4%; by our arithmetic, the lead narrowed from 66.1 points to 23.1.
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A note on sourcing. Bloomberg’s report is cited from its opening paragraphs. Provider shares, adoption rates and spending figures are from the working paper Who Pays for AI? by Datta, Lambert and Schneider and its website, and cover direct payments in UK bank and card records; app store subscriptions are excluded from the shares. Sensor Tower figures are as reported by Trending Topics. Point gaps and ratios are our arithmetic.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
