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Anthropic's Claude Tops App Store After Pentagon Dispute Spurs ChatGPT Backlash

• By John K. Waters
• 03/02/2026

Anthropic's Claude artificial intelligence chatbot reached the top of Apple's U.S. App Store free-app rankings over the weekend, surpassing OpenAI's ChatGPT in a shift that analysts and company executives attributed to public backlash following a high-profile dispute between Anthropic and the Pentagon.

Claude reached the No. 1 spot on Apple's rankings of top free U.S. apps on Saturday, leaving ChatGPT at No. 2 and Google's Gemini at No. 4. Claude stood at No. 5 compared with No. 2 for ChatGPT on the Google Play store as of Monday.

The surge followed a breakdown in contract talks between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense. After Anthropic attempted to negotiate safeguards to prevent the DoD from using its AI models for mass domestic surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons, President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using all Anthropic products, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he would designate the company a supply-chain threat.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei rejected the terms outright and, in an interview with CBS News, called the government's designation "retaliatory and punitive," adding that Anthropic remained open to working with the military within its previously stated limits. "We believe that crossing those lines is contrary to American values, and we wanted to stand up for American values," Amodei said.

The climb in Claude's rankings had been building for weeks. On Jan. 30, the Claude iOS app was ranked No. 131 in the U.S. and bounced around the top 20 for much of February, according to data from analytics company Sensor Tower. ChatGPT had held the No. 1 spot for most of February.

Before the release of Anthropic's Super Bowl ads, which took a dig at OpenAI's move to include ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic was ranked 42nd on Apple's App Store. Since then, it has remained in the top 10 most downloaded apps.

An Anthropic spokesperson said the company's growth had accelerated sharply in recent days. Free users increased by over 60 percent since January, with daily sign-ups tripling since November and breaking an all-time record every day last week. Paying subscribers more than doubled this year.

OpenAI Steps In, Faces Its Own Backlash
Hours after Anthropic was blacklisted, OpenAI moved quickly to fill the void. OpenAI subsequently announced its own agreement with the Pentagon, with CEO Sam Altman claiming it includes safeguards related to domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons.

By Saturday, OpenAI had published more detailed contract terms, stating that its AI system would not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in cases where law, regulation, or policy requires human control, and that the system would not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons' private information.

Altman acknowledged the awkward optics. He said the DoD had turned out to be "flexible on what we needed," but that the effective blacklisting of Anthropic set an "extremely scary precedent."

The swift pivot drew criticism from some users. ChatGPT users protested OpenAI's Pentagon contract online by spreading the message to "Cancel ChatGPT" across Reddit and X. Some users posted guides for deleting ChatGPT accounts and migrating to Claude. One Reddit post racked up 30,000 upvotes under the heading "Cancel and Delete ChatGPT."

A dedicated website, CancelChatGPT.com, was set up to summarize criticism of OpenAI and offer assistance with account deletion.

Not all users were moved. In several Reddit discussions, commentators argued that the news did not influence their model choice, pointing to Anthropic's own partnership with Palantir and Amazon Web Services concluded in November 2024, which grants U.S. intelligence agencies and defense departments access to Claude models.

Wall Street Weighs In
Wedbush securities analyst Dan Ives described the government's action against Anthropic in stark terms. "This is in essence a scarlet-letter designation for Anthropic that puts this AI stalwart in the same category as the Chinese tech player Huawei in the U.S.," Ives wrote in a note to clients.

Ives also noted significant confusion about where the two companies' arrangements actually differ: "There is a lot of confusion on the red lines in this deal and essentially what is different between what OpenAI is now doing for the Pentagon vs. Anthropic's proposal/guardrails," he wrote.

He warned that business uncertainty could weigh on Anthropic's enterprise prospects. "Some enterprises could go pencils down on Claude deployments while this all gets settled in the courts," he wrote.

Cultural Moment
The dispute produced an unusual cultural footnote. Pop singer Katy Perry posted a screenshot of Anthropic's Pro subscription for consumers, with a heart superimposed over it, hours after OpenAI's Pentagon deal was announced.

A viral video appeared to show chalk art outside Anthropic's offices in San Francisco reading "you give us
courage."

Scale Gap Remains
Despite the momentum, Anthropic faces a significant gap in raw scale. OpenAI, founded several years before Anthropic by former employees who later left to start the rival firm, now has over 900 million weekly users of ChatGPT. ChatGPT remains right behind Claude on the App Store charts and retains a substantial first-mover advantage.

Anthropic said it plans to challenge its supply-chain risk designation in court. The company, the Pentagon, and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for additional comment.