Brits pour £1 billion annually into paid AI as Claude gains on ChatGPT

How big the market already is

UK consumers are now spending more than £1 billion a year on AI subscriptions, an annualized pace of about $1.4 billion. By July, 5.1% of adults in Britain were paying for AI, roughly twice the share a year before.

Those numbers come from research released Thursday by academics at three universities, based on a dataset that includes 14 million UK banking and payment-card accounts.

Who is getting the money

OpenAI's ChatGPT still takes the largest slice of consumer spend, but Anthropic's Claude is closing the distance. From December 2025 to July 2026, Claude's market share quadrupled, helped by a higher share of users opting for pricier tiers.

OpenAI and Anthropic are both preparing for blockbuster IPOs. The analysis underscores how rapidly consumer AI in Britain has scaled in just a few years as more people choose to pay instead of sticking with free versions.

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The academics and the broader backdrop

The work is attributed to Datta, Lambert and Schneider (2026), with Peter Lambert of the University of Warwick as a co-author and contributions from the London School of Economics and Imperial Business School. "The first thing that surprised me is just the sheer volume of everything," Lambert said, describing it as "unheard of" that a paid consumer technology would reach millions of adults in just a few years.

Separate research from payments provider Stripe indicates the UK's consumer AI adoption lags the US by only about 10% and is well ahead of the European Union. Former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer set a target for Britain to lead the G7 on the speed of AI adoption, but his successor, Andy Burnham, has expressed that ambition less directly.

Thursday's release follows comments from the Office for National Statistics that AI appears to be benefiting corporate profits more than workers. The ONS has earlier attributed part of the recent resilience in UK growth to IT and AI, highlighting that output in the three-month span ending in August was 1.8% higher than a year earlier. James Benford, who serves as the ONS's director general for surveys and economic statistics, said Wednesday that any productivity gains are largely "accruing to firms."

What this means for your portfolio

Consumer wallets are now a real revenue stream for AI, and share shifts inside that spend are already visible. The public's willingness to pay points to durable demand, while official data suggests more of the upside is landing with companies than labor.

Learning how to use emerging tech can give investors a thoughtful practical edge. On 11/17, our CEO Jaspreet Singh goes live for our first ever investor livestream on how to use ChatGPT and Claude to invest like a pro. Register to join him.