Claude’s Small Crowd Is Paying Big, and That’s Changing the AI Race

Anthropic’s Claude has gradually built a profitable position in the crowded AI market. It may not draw the attention that ChatGPT or Grok receive, but its financial performance tells a different story. Despite having far fewer users, Claude generates almost as much revenue per person as OpenAI’s flagship app, which shows that scale alone no longer defines success in this field.

Appfigures estimates that^[3] Claude has around fifteen million downloads, compared with nearly eight hundred million for ChatGPT. Yet each of Claude’s installs brings in roughly two dollars and ninety-seven cents in net revenue, close to ChatGPT’s three dollars and fourteen cents. Grok and Perplexity earn less than a dollar per user, which places Anthropic in a far stronger position than many expected. In September, Claude users spent an estimated five and a half million dollars through Apple’s and Google’s stores, reflecting steady in-app income despite limited reach.

OpenAI’s financial structure remains far larger, backed by about one trillion dollars’ worth of commercial agreements and a valuation near five hundred billion dollars, the highest for any private company. Anthropic, supported by its own investors including Amazon and Google, holds a valuation around one hundred eighty-three billion, yet its growth rate has been sharper. The company’s annual revenue run rate stood near one billion dollars at the end of 2024, reached about three billion by mid-2025, and is now estimated at seven billion as of October. Forecasts suggest it could hit nine billion by year-end. OpenAI’s revenue run rate rose from roughly five and a half billion in January to about twelve billion by July, but the gap between the two is shrinking quickly.

The pace of change is striking. OpenAI first reached the one-billion-dollar annual level in mid-2023. Anthropic achieved the same milestone a year later, then multiplied that figure several times within twelve months. The company’s internal target of twenty-six billion in yearly revenue by 2026 now looks ambitious but not unrealistic.

Chart: Sherwood

Part of that momentum comes from the way Anthropic has positioned Claude. The app draws a smaller but more committed audience, made up largely of professionals and developers who use it for practical work. These users are more inclined to pay for subscriptions and advanced features, creating higher average returns than broader consumer bases typically deliver. That kind of focused monetization gives Anthropic an efficiency that few competitors have managed to match.

Sustaining this level of performance will be difficult once the user base expands. Growth often attracts casual users who spend less, which can reduce the per-user average. Yet if Anthropic can preserve even part of that revenue ratio while scaling, it will keep its business healthier than rivals with far larger followings.

The competition between OpenAI and Anthropic now defines the economic core of the AI industry. OpenAI’s size and valuation still set it apart, but Anthropic’s disciplined strategy shows that financial strength can come from depth rather than reach. Claude may never rival ChatGPT in total downloads, yet it has already proven that profitability per user can be just as powerful a measure of success.

Notes: This post was edited/created using GenAI tools.

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