Anthropic’s Claude climbs to No. 2 in the App Store following the Pentagon debate

Anthropic’s chatbot Claude appears to have benefited from the interest surrounding the company’s talks with the Pentagon.

Like the first was reported by CNBCas of Saturday afternoon, Claude is currently number two among free apps in the US Apple App Store – number one is OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and number three is Google Gemini.

According to More from SensorTowerClaude was out of the top 100 at the end of January, and has spent most of February somewhere above 20. His list has risen in the past few days, from sixth on Wednesday to fourth on Thursday to second on Saturday (today).

After Anthropic tried to negotiate a waiver to prevent the Department of Defense from using its AI models for mass surveillance at home or autonomous devices, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using all Anthropic products and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said making the company a supplychain risk.

OpenAI later announced his partnership with the Pentagonwhich CEO Sam Altman said includes security related to home monitoring and autonomous devices.