Key points
- Which AI companies count paying subscribers
- What run rates leave out
- Where ChatGPT shows ads
- Where Anthropic's revenue comes from
Anthropic brought in $11.6 billion in second-quarter revenue, compared with OpenAI's $6.7 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported. Yet ChatGPT has far more users.
That gap is why I wanted to look beyond user counts. Who pays, what do they pay for, and how much revenue do these businesses actually earn? I went through filings, earnings calls, and company posts for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Mistral.
The disclosures leave plenty of gaps. Among the general-purpose chatbots I reviewed, only OpenAI and SpaceX (SPCX), which owns Grok, have published paying consumer subscriber counts. Microsoft (MSFT) reports paid business seats. Alphabet (GOOGL), Anthropic, and Meta Platforms (META) don't disclose consumer AI subscriber counts.
Even the available figures measure different things: individual subscriptions, business seats, or bundles that include more than a chatbot. The table below shows what each company has disclosed and when.
Few companies disclose paying subscriber counts
| AI product | Paying customers (company-disclosed) | Users (company-disclosed) |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT (OpenAI) | 50M+ consumer subscribers and 9M+ paying business users (Feb. 2026) | 1.2B people a week (Oct. 2026) |
| Grok (SpaceX) | 1.9M SuperGrok subscribers, plus 4.4M X Premium (Mar. 31, 2026) | 117M monthly users of Grok features (Mar. 31, 2026) |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | 30M+ paid seats (July 2026) | Not disclosed |
| Gemini (Google) | AI plan subscribers not disclosed; 8M+ Gemini Enterprise paid seats (Feb. 2026) | 1B+ monthly users (Aug. 2026) |
| Claude (Anthropic) | Not disclosed | Not disclosed |
| Meta AI | Not disclosed | 1B+ monthly users (Oct. 2025) |
The table shows how old some of these disclosures are. OpenAI's subscriber count is from February, Grok's figures are from March, and Meta's user count is a year old. Only the ChatGPT and Gemini user counts come from the past two months.
More recent estimates come from outside the companies. In August, 4.5% of US consumers in YipitData's card-spending panel paid for a personal subscription to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, up from 2.1% a year earlier, according to Andreessen Horowitz's latest consumer AI report. Within that panel, ChatGPT had roughly three times as many paying subscribers as either rival. Claude overtook Gemini earlier this year. The estimates cover US consumers in the panel, not the full subscriber base.
OpenAI's own figures are older. In February, OpenAI reported more than 50 million consumer subscribers and more than 9 million paying business users. It hasn't updated either count since, even as its reported weekly audience grew from more than 900 million then to 1.2 billion on October 5. Those disclosures don't establish what share of today's users pay.
Grok's numbers come from SpaceX's IPO filing. As of March 31, it had about 1.9 million SuperGrok subscribers and about 4.4 million X Premium subscribers. X Premium bundles Grok with other features, so its subscribers aren't a standalone measure of demand for the chatbot. About 117 million monthly users touched Grok's features.
Microsoft's paid Copilot seats are bought by businesses, not individuals, and the count doubled from 15 million in January, Chief Executive Satya Nadella said in July.
Google is the hard one. The Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users in August, but Google has never said how many people pay for its AI Pro or AI Ultra plans. Google's count of 350 million paid subscriptions includes YouTube and Google One, so it isn't an AI number.
Spending trackers show who is paying now
| Company (product) | App store revenue, Aug. 2026 (Appfigures estimate, net) | Share of AI chatbot web visits, Aug. 2026 (Similarweb estimate) | US businesses paying, Aug. 2026 (Ramp's platform data) |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI (ChatGPT) | $230M | 55.5% | 39.8% |
| Anthropic (Claude) | $82M | 9.3% | 43.8% |
| Google (Gemini) | Not reported | 25.6% | 6.2% |
| SpaceX (Grok) | $37.4M | 2.4% | 4.6% |
| DeepSeek | Not reported | 3.4% | 0.3% |
Anthropic leads OpenAI among businesses using Ramp's payment platform, 43.8% to 39.8%, after trailing 16.2% to 41% a year earlier, according to Ramp's AI Index. Ramp counts the share of businesses paying each company, not how much they spend.
In August, Claude earned its highest monthly app store revenue yet, while Grok's revenue more than doubled its January level, according to Appfigures estimates. The estimates are after Apple's and Google's cut and exclude subscriptions bought on the web.
ChatGPT's share of AI chatbot web visits fell to 55.5% in August from 73.3% a year earlier as Gemini and Claude gained, Similarweb data shows. ChatGPT still has 2.5 times as many monthly mobile users as Gemini and 14 times as many as Claude, according to Sensor Tower data in the a16z report.
Run rates don't show revenue earned over a year
A revenue run rate annualizes a recent month or quarter. It describes the current sales pace, not revenue earned over a full year. Anthropic said its run rate crossed $47 billion in May, and Bloomberg reported it hit $65 billion by the end of July, based on figures Anthropic shared with investors.
Anthropic's actual revenue for all of 2025 was nearly $4.6 billion, with an operating loss of more than $8 billion, according to the company's draft IPO prospectus as reported by Reuters. The net loss was about $42 billion, mostly because of a roughly $34 billion accounting charge on financing that can convert into shares.
Of that 2025 revenue, $789 million came from subscriptions and about $3.8 billion from customers paying based on how much they used Claude.
OpenAI has never published its financials. Its 2025 revenue was $13.07 billion, according to leaked audited documents that the Financial Times verified, Quartz reported.
OpenAI's second-quarter revenue rose from $5.7 billion in the first quarter, while Anthropic's more than doubled. OpenAI's operating loss widened to $12.3 billion, while Anthropic made a small operating profit.
SpaceX reports AI as a separate business segment. AI revenue was $2.6 billion in the second quarter, but $1.6 billion of that came from new cloud computing contracts, not Grok. The company doesn't break out Grok's subscription revenue on its own.
Advertising adds another revenue stream
OpenAI's ad business hit a $1 billion annualized run rate, the company told CNBC in August. Ads show up only on ChatGPT's free tier, which is the vast majority of its users, and its low-cost Go plan. On October 5, OpenAI said it would start testing visual ads during image generation for those same users.
Google sells ads around AI answers in search. AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, and AI Mode has passed 1 billion, but Alphabet doesn't report AI ad revenue separately. Meta, Microsoft, and SpaceX haven't disclosed ad revenue from their chatbots either.
Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Mistral are private and share even less. Perplexity's annualized revenue topped $750 million, The Information reported in August, and Mistral Chief Executive Arthur Mensch put the company's run rate above $400 million in February. DeepSeek's chatbot app is free.
I started by looking for paying subscribers. What I found is that subscriber counts explain only part of these businesses. Usage fees, business seats, and advertising also bring in money, and the companies disclose them differently. The useful comparison is revenue earned over the same period, with enough detail to show where it came from. IPO filings from OpenAI and Anthropic could make that comparison easier.
