Who Pays for AI?

Nikhil Datta, Peter John Lambert and Patrick Schneider
Additional contact information
Nikhil Datta: University of Warwick and CEP, London School of Economics
Peter John Lambert: University of Warwick and London School of Economics
Patrick Schneider: Imperial Business School

CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE)

Abstract: We document who pays for AI tools using a panel of millions of open banking and cardholder accounts from 2022 to mid-2026, covering billions of transactions. We find that subscriptions to products like Claude and ChatGPT have roughly doubled every 12 months since their introduction, reaching one in twenty UK adults by mid-2026. Adoption is five times higher for under 30s than over 60s, 27 percent higher for men, and grows 1.8 times larger from the bottom to the top quintile of earnings. While ChatGPT held 74 percent of direct subscription spending in late 2025, its share fell 21 percentage points by mid 2026 as Claude surged from 7 to 29 percent of direct spending, driven partly by growth in users who work in technical and professional roles and pay for the most expensive plans. High-frequency banking data are well suited to study the rapidly evolving market for paid consumer AI products.

Keywords: artificial intelligence; technology adoption; subscriptions; transaction data; occupational exposure; product competition JEL Classification: O33, D12, L86, J24, C81, E21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/c ... tions/wp828.2026.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cge:wacage:828

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CAGE Online Working Paper Series from Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jane Snape ().