Anthropic Challenges the Pentagon and Sees Claude Surpassing ChatGPT

Anthropic Rejects Mass Surveillance and Gains Popularity

Last week, Anthropic took a firm stance by refusing to allow the use of its artificial intelligence models for the mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons. This decision led the Pentagon to consider the company a risk to its supply chain, effectively ending negotiations between the two parties.

This resistance seems to have worked in favor of Anthropic. Recent data shows a significant increase in the use of its chatbot Claude, with a notable influx of new users.

Claude Tops Downloads

According to AppFigures, the Claude app experienced a dramatic surge in downloads in early March. On March 2, TechCrunch reported that Claude had reached 149,000 daily downloads, surpassing ChatGPT, which had 124,000. Claude is thus outpacing competitors like Perplexity and Copilot.

Online, Claude's traffic jumped by 43% in one month. Over the course of a year, Anthropic's conversational agent recorded a 297% increase in web traffic. This trend can be attributed to Claude's remarkable performance in various areas such as text generation, document analysis, and web search.

ChatGPT Faces Growing Challenges

In contrast to Anthropic, OpenAI has chosen to collaborate with the Pentagon, signing a partnership with the Department of Defense, now renamed the Department of War. Although safeguards are in place, Sam Altman acknowledged that this decision could create a negative perception.

In terms of traffic, OpenAI has seen its numbers decline following the announcement of this partnership. Downloads of ChatGPT initially increased by 14% before dropping by 13% and then 5% in the following days. Additionally, the app recorded a 9% uninstallation rate over 30 days.

Despite these challenges, OpenAI maintains a dominant position with nearly 250 million active users, compared to around 11 million for Claude.