Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude is rapidly gaining traction among paying consumers, while the company simultaneously calls on U.S. lawmakers to crack down on intellectual property theft by Chinese rivals. The twin developments, revealed in separate disclosures this week, underscore the growing commercial and geopolitical stakes in the artificial intelligence race.
Consumer spending on Claude surges
Credit card transaction data from analytics firm Indagari shows Claude’s paying consumer base and revenue grew month-over-month, with a roughly 75% increase since January 2026. The surge continued even after March, when Anthropic publicly refused to allow its models to be used by the Trump administration for mass surveillance, a decision that appears to have resonated with privacy-conscious users. Education platform DataCamp reports that interest in Claude among self-directed learners has exploded; “Claude” is now the most searched term on its site, surpassing “AI,” and demand for Claude courses has increased 18-fold in the last 30 days alone.
Despite these gains, ChatGPT remains dominant, with significantly more total users and paying subscribers, according to Sensor Tower. However, investors eyeing potential public offerings for both OpenAI and Anthropic will closely watch revenue diversification and consumer loyalty.
Distillation attack allegations and congressional letter
In a June 10 letter to Senate Banking Committee leaders, Anthropic alleged that operators affiliated with Alibaba and its Qwen AI lab generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April 22 and June 5 using nearly 25,000 fraudulent accounts. The company described this as the largest known model distillation attack, targeting Claude’s agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon planning capabilities.
Anthropic framed the issue as a national security threat, warning that Chinese labs are capturing returns on U.S. investments without bearing frontier training costs. The company urged Congress to expand intelligence sharing, strengthen export controls on AI chips, close overseas data center loopholes, and penalize entities engaged in large-scale model extraction.
“This campaign was striking for its brazen nature,” the letter stated, noting that Alibaba is listed on the NYSE and accountable to U.S. regulators. The push builds on earlier allegations that Chinese developers DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax generated over 16 million Claude exchanges earlier this year. The debate over distillation remains contentious; Elon Musk recently testified that xAI had “partly” used OpenAI models while training Grok, blurring the line between legitimate technique and unauthorized extraction.
Anthropic declined to comment specifically on the letter but told Decrypt it will “continue working with Congress and the administration to maintain American AI leadership.”
