Anthropic's Claude tops App Store charts as backlash builds against OpenAI's ChatGPT

By Emily Bary

OpenAI faces some user criticism over its new deal with the Department of Defense

The Trump administration declared Anthropic to be a supply-chain risk, which one analyst described as a "scarlet-letter designation."

Anthropic has been blacklisted by the U.S. government, but the company may be winning over new users as a result of its spat.

Claude has become the top free app in Apple's App Store as of Sunday evening, ahead of OpenAI's ChatGPT and Alphabet's (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google Gemini. Anthropic appears to be benefiting from backlash against ChatGPT in the wake of evolving developments involving the Pentagon.

Anthropic's relationship with the U.S. government soured badly after the company declined to let its products be deployed for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. On Friday, President Donald Trump told federal agencies they would have to stop using Anthropic technology, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the company a supply-chain risk to U.S. national security.

"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.," Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to clients over the weekend.

See more: Trump blacklists Anthropic - and OpenAI swoops in

In a somewhat murky turn of events, OpenAI quickly then announced that it had struck a new relationship with the U.S. government to deploy the company's models for classified uses. But Sam Altman said on X that OpenAI believes in "prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems."

The Pentagon "agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement," Altman wrote. On Saturday, he added that the Department of Defense turned out "to be flexible on what we needed" but that the effective blacklisting of Anthropic sets an "extremely scary precedent."

"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," Ives wrote.

Anthropic, OpenAI and the White House didn't immediately respond to a MarketWatch request for comment.

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Further complicating matters is that the Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic's technology was used in Saturday's attack on Iran. Granted, Trump had given agencies six months to phase out the company's technology.

Still, some ChatGPT's users have expressed frustration with OpenAI's willingness to strike a new deal with the Trump administration. One group, QuitGPT, said on its website that Altman's deal with the government is "putting us all at risk of lethal AI for the sake of his company's profits." The group recommended Gemini and Claude as more appealing "corporate" options, as well as some smaller players.

Celebrity Katy Perry also posted a screenshot suggesting she was purchasing an annual subscription to Claude's Pro offering. And an Anthropic employee working on "special projects" shared instructions for users who wished to port over "memories" - basically, what chatbots know about you - from other providers.

While Claude already had been increasingly winning respect in the developer community for AI coding tools, Anthropic could increase its appeal with a mainstream user base if the backlash against OpenAI has a lasting effect.

But the company is in a predicament from a monetization standpoint as it deals with the effects of its supply-chain designation, which Anthropic said it plans to challenge on legal grounds.

"This will all be battled in the courts over the coming weeks and months and we hope it gets resolved sooner rather than later to end uncertainty in the AI sector as some enterprises could go pencils down on Claude deployments while this all gets settled in the courts," Ives wrote.

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-Emily Bary

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03-01-26 2032ET