AI chatbots currently take up the top three spots on the US App Store’s Top Downloaded charts. For Anthropic’s Claude, which takes the first-place position right now, that’s a jump from 42nd place just two months ago.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are currently the second and third top downloaded apps, respectively.
For Anthropic, the newly minted first place position isn’t because of some new feature or capability. Instead, the week-long saga between Anthropic and the US government seems to have thrust Claude to the top of the App Store.
Anthropic was the target of ire by both President Trump and Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth on Friday.
“In conjunction with the President’s directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic’s technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security,” Hegseth wrote on X.
“Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,” Hegseth continued. “Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.”
Anthropic responded by pointing to two reasons it disagrees with the US military’s intended use of its technology:
“We held to our exceptions for two reasons. First, we do not believe that today’s frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America’s warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights.”
While the long-term consequences of this disagreement are unclear, Anthropic appears to be winning in mindshare, at least for now, in terms of app downloads among iPhone users.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
