Who Pays for AI?

Paid AI adoption in the UK, measured monthly from de-identified bank and card payments. Supported by the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).

Working paper, October 2026

Who Pays for AI?

  • Nikhil DattaUniversity of Warwick and London School of Economics
  • Peter John LambertUniversity of Warwick and London School of Economics
  • Patrick SchneiderImperial Business School, Imperial College London

Download the paper (PDF, 2.4 MB) Get the data pack

Abstract

We document who pays for AI tools using anonymized transaction data covering 14 million UK accounts linked to demographics, earnings, and occupations. Identifying AI sellers like ChatGPT and Claude across 8 million weekly transactions, we find that active paid subscriptions roughly doubled every 12 months since early 2024, reaching one in twenty UK adults by mid-2026. Adoption is five times higher for under-30s than over-60s, 27% higher for men, and 78% higher in the top versus bottom fifth of the earnings distribution. While ChatGPT held 74% of subscription spending in December 2025, its share fell to 53% by July 2026 as Claude surged from 7% to 29%, driven by technical and professional workers and power-user plans. High-frequency transactions data are well suited to study the rapidly evolving market for consumer AI products, and we will continue to update our findings in real time.

This abstract appears exactly as in the paper.

Main findings

  • Active paid AI subscriptions roughly doubled every 12 months from early 2024, reaching 5.1% of UK adults, about 2.8 million people, by June 2026. Consumer spending ran at more than £1 billion a year.
  • Nearly nine-tenths of the growth in AI spending between January 2024 and July 2026 came from more people paying, not from each subscriber paying more.
  • Cumulative paid adoption is nearly six times higher among adults aged 20 to 29 than among those aged 60 and over, and nearly five times higher after accounting for income, gender and region. Men are 28% more likely than women to hold a subscription. Cumulative adoption is 88% higher in the top income band than in the bottom one.
  • Adoption varies twelvefold across occupations, from about 20% of IT professionals to under 3% of electricians, nurses and social care workers.
  • Adoption is highest in London: 78 paid AI users per 1,000 adults in June 2026, against 46 in the rest of the UK, with clusters in Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh.
  • Between December 2025 and July 2026, Claude's share of direct consumer spending on AI subscriptions quadrupled from 7.4% to 29.4%, while ChatGPT's fell from 73.5% to 52.5%.
  • Of Claude subscribers, 6.2% pay for plans costing £80 or more a month, against 0.3% of ChatGPT subscribers.

How to cite

Datta, Nikhil, Peter John Lambert and Patrick Schneider (2026). "Who Pays for AI?" Working paper. https://whopaysfor.ai/paper/

@techreport{datta2026whopays,
  title       = {Who Pays for AI?},
  author      = {Datta, Nikhil and Lambert, Peter John and Schneider, Patrick},
  year        = {2026},
  month       = {10},
  type        = {Working paper},
  url         = {https://whopaysfor.ai/paper/}
}