OpenAI is paying a price for its rushed deal with the Pentagon.
On Saturday, Anthropic’s Claude dethroned ChatGPT to take the top spot in the US Apple App Store. Data obtained by Business Insider shows just how suddenly the tide turned in the fight for app downloads.
Data from Appfigures, an app intelligence firm, showed that Claude surpassed ChatGPT in the US for the first time on Saturday. Claude’s US downloads were up 240% month-over-month in February, Appfigures estimated, to 1.1 million more than the previous month.
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Claude is now the No. 1 free iPhone app in five markets: the US, Canada, Germany, Ireland, and Luxembourg. An Anthropic spokesperson previously told Business Insider that as recently as a month ago, Claude didn’t even rank in the top 40 of the US Apple App Store.
Anthropic’s Mike Krieger said on Tuesday that “more than a million people are now signing up for Claude every day.”
“To everyone choosing to make @claudeai part of how they work and think: welcome,” Krieger wrote on X.
OpenAI takes a hit
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that OpenAI’s deal with the Pentagon was “rushed.” On Monday evening, he publicly released an internal message to employees in which he said that OpenAI had reopened the deal to obtain stronger protections.
Altman has also conceded that the deal was bad “optics,” given that it occurred just hours after Anthropic was essentially blacklisted from the US government for not acquiescing to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demands.
Here is re-post of an internal post:
We have been working with the DoW to make some additions in our agreement to make our principles very clear.
1. We are going to amend our deal to add this language, in addition to everything else:
“• Consistent with applicable laws,…— Sam Altman (@sama) March 3, 2026
“One thing I think I did wrong: we shouldn’t have rushed to get this out on Friday,” Altman wrote in the memo. “The issues are super complex, and demand clear communication. We were genuinely trying to de-escalate things and avoid a much worse outcome, but I think it just looked opportunistic and sloppy.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that talks with the Pentagon fell apart because the DOD insisted on unfettered access to AI models. Anthropic wanted safeguards to ensure that its AI wasn’t misused in the deployment of fully autonomous weapons or to allow for mass surveillance of American citizens.
In response to Amodei’s refusal to yield, Hegseth said he intended to formally designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk, a label that the Defense secretary said would ban the AI startup not just from working with the government but also from doing business with any defense contractor.
Amodei said that his company would fight such an action in court. In the meantime, Hegseth’s potential actions could take a bite out of Anthropic’s business with defense contractors and could scare away other companies weary of doing business with a firm on the outs with the Trump administration.
Despite the negative headlines, ChatGPT remains far and away the worldwide leader for AI chatbots.
The same day OpenAI announced its Pentagon deal, the company touted that ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users. In comparison, Google disclosed during its most recent earnings on February 4 that Gemini had 750 million monthly active users.
According to Appfigures, as of the end of February, ChatGPT has been downloaded an estimated 8.7 million times in the US so far in 2026. In comparison, Claude has been downloaded an estimated 2.1 million times.
Near the end of 2025, Altman declared a “code red” to marshal resources to ChatGPT amid concerns that Gemini’s latest update had surpassed ChatGPT’s capabilities.
It remains to be seen whether this current blunder will prove harder to bounce back from.
Appfigures’ estimates are based on firms’ use of trained AI models that turn observed trends in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store into estimated downloads. The estimates do not include re-installs or downloads across multiple devices by a single user account.
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