Anthropic's refusal to allow its Claude AI to be used for U.S. government mass surveillance or autonomous weapons, which marked it as a supply-chain risk, appears to have boosted its consumer appeal. Data shows Claude's mobile app is now surpassing ChatGPT in new U.S. downloads and has seen a dramatic increase in daily active users, growing 183% since the start of the year.
Claude's web traffic is also rising significantly, potentially at the expense of ChatGPT, which saw a drop. The app has reached the top of the U.S. App Store and is setting new sign-up records.
While ChatGPT still maintains a much larger overall user base, Claude's growth in both mobile engagement and web usage indicates a notable shift in consumer preference following the company's public stance.
Main Topics: Anthropic's ethical stance with the Pentagon, Claude's mobile app growth metrics (downloads and active users), comparison with competitors (primarily ChatGPT), and Claude's web traffic growth.
Claude’s daily active users are on the rise on mobile devices, as are its new app installs, following the company’s fallout with the Pentagon. After Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to allow the government to use its AI systems for mass surveillance of Americans or to power fully autonomous weapons, the AI model provider behind Claude was marked as a supply-chain risk.
However, Anthropic’s stance led many consumers to favor the model, data suggests.
App intelligence provider Appfigures reports that the U.S. downloads of Claude’s mobile app continue to surpass those of ChatGPT. The most recent figures from March 2 show Claude with 149,000 daily downloads, compared with 124,000 for ChatGPT, the company’s estimates indicate.
While download figures offer a window into how many new users are installing the app for the first time, active users offer insight into how many people are actually using it.
On that front, another market intelligence provider, Similarweb, found that Claude’s app on iOS and Android devices saw 11.3 million daily active users on March 2, up 183% from the start of the year when usage was around 4 million, and up from 5 million daily active users at the beginning of February.
Claude’s growth put it ahead of other AI apps by daily active users, like Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, but not other top rivals like ChatGPT. This is partially due to the fact that Claude’s jump in usage began later in the month, timed around the news of Anthropic’s tense negotiations with the Pentagon. If these trends continue throughout March, it could rank higher.
Of course, ChatGPT still dominates the market by a significant factor, as its daily active users on March 2 were 250.5 million across iOS and Android.
Similarweb also reports that Claude’s web traffic has been growing.
While it’s still far behind other top AI providers in terms of web traffic, Claude’s web traffic was up 43% month-over-month in February, and up 297.7% year-over-year. At least some of this growth could be at the expense of ChatGPT, whose web traffic dropped 6.5% month-over-month during the same time period. Gemini also saw a slight bump of 2.1%, which is slower growth than in previous months.
Anthropic itself has been touting Claude’s progress, noting that its AI chatbot is now seeing more than 1 million sign-ups per day after becoming the No. 1 app on the U.S. App Store over the past weekend — a position it still holds. The app is also No. 1 in 15 other countries, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, the U.K.
The company noted, too, that Claude has broken its own signup record every day since early last week in every country where Claude is available.
ChatGPT’s app uninstalls, meanwhile, have been growing, an earlier report found.
Anthropic said it doesn’t comment on third-party data, but a spokesperson noted that daily active users have more than tripled since the beginning of 2026, and paid subscribers have doubled.
Updated with Anthropic’s comment after publication.
Meridiano
