Claude’s consumer growth continues to rise after the Pentagon deal debacle

The number of daily active users of Claude on mobile devices, as well as new app installations, are on the rise, in the wake of 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 operate fully autonomous weapons, the AI ​​model provider behind Cloud has been labeled a supply chain risk.

However, the data suggests that Anthropic’s position has led many consumers to prefer this model.

App information provider Appfigures reports that US downloads of Claude’s mobile app still exceed those of ChatGPT. The latest numbers released on March 2 show that Cloud has 149,000 daily downloads, compared to 124,000 downloads for ChatGPT, the company estimates.

While download numbers provide a window into how many new users are installing the app for the first time, active users provide insight into how many people are actually using it.

On that front, another market intelligence provider, Sameweb, found that the Cloud 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 has put it ahead of other AI applications used by daily active users, like Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, but not other top competitors like ChatGPT. This is partly due to the fact that the jump in CLOUD usage began later in the month, around the time of 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, with its daily active users on March 2 reaching 250.5 million across iOS and Android.

Similar reports also say that Cloud’s web traffic is growing.

Although it is 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 297.7% year-over-year. At least some of this growth may be at the expense of ChatGPT, whose web traffic declined 6.5% month-over-month over the same time period. Gemini also saw a slight increase of 2.1%, which is slower growth than in previous months.

Anthropic itself has been touting Claude’s progress, noting that its AI-powered chatbot is now seeing more than a million registrations per day after becoming the No. 1 app in the US App Store over the past weekend — a position it still holds. The app is also No. 1 in 15 other countries, including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The company also noted that Cloud has been breaking its subscription record every day since early last week, in every country where Cloud is available.

Meanwhile, uninstalls of the ChatGPT app have been on the rise, a previous report found.

Anthropy was asked for comment, but no one was available at the time of publication.