Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot has generated $1 million in revenue from its mobile app on iOS and Android 16 weeks after its launch. Data from Appfigures shows that nearly half of this revenue came from the US market.

Although Claude AI took 16 weeks to reach this milestone—compared to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which did it in just 3 weeks—it still outperformed some competitors. According to the same data, Microsoft Copilot hit $1 million in 19 weeks, while Perplexity’s mobile app took 22 weeks.

Anthropic Claude AI’s mobile app struggles to impress

The four-month gap between Claude AI’s launch and its first $1 million revenue reflects the app’s lukewarm reception. In its first week, the app garnered only 157,000 downloads globally on iOS and Android. This is well below the 480,000 downloads ChatGPT achieved in its first five days on iOS in the US.

Despite some improvement, the Claude AI app has not met Anthropic’s expectations. Among iOS apps in the US, Claude ranks 95th in downloads and 68th in revenue. These figures are significantly lower than ChatGPT, which ranks 1st and 26th, respectively.

AI Apps Revenue (Source: Appfigures)

Given that most of the application downloads and subscriptions come from the US, the poor rankings highlight the lower consumer demand for Claude compared to ChatGPT. Analysts explained that this could be due to various reasons, including Anthropic’s lower brand recognition compared to OpenAI and the saturation of the artificial intelligence market by several companies with similar products.

However, things could get a lot worse for the Claude mobile app in the future. Most phone makers are already planning to integrate AI features directly into their devices, which could eliminate the need for a user to get another mobile AI app. For instance, Apple is planning to introduce Apple Intelligence, giving iPhone users direct access to ChatGPT via Siri.

AI startups revenue fails to match spending

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s modest revenue from its mobile app shows how difficult it is generally for AI startups to generate income despite expending billions in resources. The company, valued at $18 billion, projects that it will spend around $2.7 billion developing its product this year. This is a far cry from its reported expected revenue of $67 million.

However, it is not the only AI venture that is currently overspending. Even the posterchild of AI, OpenAI, is projected to lose as much as $5 billion this year and could run out of cash within 12 months. A report from The Information claims the startup will spend about $7 billion on training its AI models while expending another $1.5 billion on payroll.

Despite the massive amounts that these companies are spending on AI, spending is unlikely to stop anytime soon as many worry about being left behind in the AI race. As to profits, industry experts believe it is coming. Joe Davis, the chief economist at Vanguard Global, recently wrote that the promise of AI is real.

He said:

“Our research suggests that the odds of an AI-driven surge in labor productivity are between 45% and 55%. In that scenario, we believe the U.S. economy would grow at a real (inflation-adjusted) annualized rate of about 3.1% between 2028 and 2040. The intervening years reflect the need for additional investments in the technology and time for them to pay off.”

However, he added that there is about a 40% chance that AI will not meet expectations regarding benefits to match spending. Therefore, investors need to manage their expectations about AI returns, particularly in the near term.