The Claude AI model has gained popularity after being blacklisted by the Pentagon last week over ethical concerns.
Claude rose to the number one spot on Apple’s list of the best free apps in the US on Saturday, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT, just a day after the Pentagon tapped OpenAI to supply artificial intelligence to classified military networks. The bot app climbed the iPhone app charts in the UK, but did not overtake ChatGPT. Claude also climbed the Android charts in the US and UK, although ChatGPT reigned supreme, according to data from Sensor Tower.
Claude and other apps from startup Anthropic suffered outages early Monday amid what the company described as “unprecedented demand for Claude” over the past week. More than 1,400 users reported outages shortly after 6 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, an online platform that monitors service outages. At 11 a.m. ET, Anthropic stated that the incident had been resolved.
Even when the company fell out with the Pentagon, business flourished. “Every day last week was an all-time record for Claude’s registrations,” read a company statement.
Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, called Anthropic a supply chain risk last week after CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down on red lines around the use of his company’s technology for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Amodei has said that current AI models are not reliable enough to be used in these weapons and that mass surveillance violates constitutional rights. It has also questioned the federal government’s ability to designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk and has so far informed Pentagon customers and contractors that its use is not affected.
The federal government has accused Anthropic of overreaching, and Donald Trump said on his Truth Social platform: “The crazy leftists at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE by trying to STRENGTHEN the (Pentagon) and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution.” The Trump administration then turned to OpenAI’s GPT Chat for the job.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, announced Friday that his company reached a deal with the federal government just hours after negotiations between the Pentagon and Anthropic collapsed. He said the military would not use ChatGPT for autonomous killing systems or mass surveillance. But those claims have been met with skepticism by many AI experts, lawyers, tech workers and users, who asked why the US government would abandon its partnership with Anthropic, only to reach a deal with OpenAI that has the same safeguards it criticized. Some ChatGPT users, including pop singer Katy Perry, announced their switch to Anthropic on social media and urged others to cancel their subscriptions as well.
Anthropic is already off to a strong start to the year, with free active users up more than 60% and daily subscriptions quadrupling, the company said. Claude’s paid subscribers also doubled.
Anthropic has made it easy for new users to switch to Claude through its memory feature, which is available on all paid plans. “With a simple copy and paste, Claude refreshes his memory and picks up right where he left off,” the company notes on its website. “Claude can matter what matters, so your first conversation seems like the hundredth.” A step-by-step guide provides a notice to the AI provider if a user wants to leave the site in favor of Claude.
