Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads mocking AI with ads helped push Claude app into the top 10

Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads — featuring darkly comedic scenarios of people asking chatbots for advice, only to be directed to “cougar” dating sites and height-enhancing flip-flops — are starting to pay off. In the days that followed, Anthropic’s chatbot Claude rose from No. 41 on the US App Store to become a top 10 app. As of Friday, Cloud ranked seventh — its highest ranking to date — indicating that its “ad-free” offering is resonating strongly with users.

According to new data from market intelligence provider Appfigures, Claude’s US downloads across both iOS and Android totaled an estimated 148,000 from Sunday to Tuesday – the latest data available. This represents a 32% increase on the previous three days, from Thursday to Saturday, when downloads totaled about 112,000.

Cloud’s average daily Sunday-Tuesday downloads were 49,200, up 32% from the usual Sunday-Tuesday average of 37,400 per day.

The numbers show that Anthropic’s Super Bowl commercials, along with Anthropic’s recent release of the new Opus 4.6 model, have served to bring attention to the Claude app and its key differentiation from ChatGPT. The latter rolled out ads for free users this week, just as Anthropic’s ads warned.

As a result, the Cloud app is receiving more attention than when it first appeared on mobile.

The consumer-focused AI app arrived on iOS in May 2024 and received a somewhat lukewarm reception. ChatGPT has conquered the market on mobile devices and has grown to nearly half a million installs in the first five days. In comparison, Claude only had 157,000 global downloads during its first week and never ranked higher than 55th in the US App Store.

Globally, Claude saw some gains last week as well. Total global downloads of Claude across both the App Store and Google Play increased 15% from Sunday to Tuesday compared to last Thursday to Saturday. However, this was less than half of the gains seen in the US, Appfigures noted.