Vietnamese users spent $1.71 million on Anthropic’s Claude in the first half of the year, propelling the app to second place in mobile revenue nationally, trailing only ChatGPT. That’s a sharp climb from ninth place in the first half of 2025.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains dominant, pulling in $7.15 million from Vietnamese users over the same period. That figure alone matches the combined spending across every other AI application in the market. ChatGPT also leads adoption outright, with 11.26 million downloads and 20.39 million monthly active users.
Small Downloads, Outsized Revenue
Claude’s download numbers tell a very different story than its revenue. The app garnered roughly 790,000 downloads across the App Store and Google Play in Vietnam, drawing 470,000 monthly active users. That placed it ninth among the country’s most installed AI tools, well behind its revenue ranking.
Google’s Gemini ranked fifth in revenue at $440,000, backed by 5.64 million downloads and 9.21 million monthly active users. Perplexity, the AI search engine, generated over $184,000, landing tenth in mobile revenue despite sitting fourteenth in downloads.
According to Donny Kristianto, a senior director at Sensor Tower, Claude’s domestic user base consists largely of advanced users and professionals who proactively subscribe to premium tiers. They tend to pay after hitting usage limits or exploring advanced capabilities rather than being pushed into a subscription. As a result, its revenue per user is significantly higher than the industry average
, Kristianto told VnExpress.
Spending Nearly Doubled in a Year
Consumer spending on AI applications in Vietnam surged 155% and 242% year over year starting from 2023. In the second quarter of 2026 alone, Vietnamese users spent $8.54 million on AI apps, nearly double the $4.99 million spent during all of 2024 combined.
Sensor Tower analysts note that AI companies operating in Vietnam are shifting focus away from pure user acquisition and toward monetization strategies, a sign the market is maturing past its early free-trial phase.
What the Numbers Leave Out
Sensor Tower’s figures track only in-app transactions completed directly via the App Store and Google Play. This omits web checkouts and enterprise sales entirely, and revenue per user for tools like ChatGPT and Gemini is also shaped by how generous their free tiers are.
- Many users test premium features without paying immediately
- Web based purchases and third party billing bypass mobile app stores completely
- Google users often unlock premium Gemini tiers through Google Drive storage plans instead
- University students frequently sign up through discounted educational rates
Despite the growth, spending per install in Vietnam still lags well behind international benchmarks. Global revenue per download reached $2.115 in the second quarter of 2026, roughly five times higher than Vietnam’s figure. On the global stage, Claude claimed second place in generative AI mobile revenue for the first half of the year at $358.34 million, compared to ChatGPT’s $2.7 billion.
Hashlytics Take
The download to revenue mismatch is the real story here, not the raw dollar figures. Claude sits nine spots below its download ranking on the revenue table, which means a small, concentrated group of professionals is generating outsized spend rather than mass adoption driving the number. That’s a healthier signal for Anthropic than a bigger download count with thin monetization would be. It also means Vietnam’s five times gap versus global revenue per download isn’t really a demand problem. It’s a market still figuring out who its paying users actually are.
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