Claude’s consumer user growth accelerates despite Pentagon contract setback

Claude’s daily active users on mobile devices are climbing, and new app installs are also increasing following the company’s fallout with the Pentagon. After Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei declined to let the government use its AI systems for mass surveillance of Americans or for fully autonomous weapons, the AI company behind Claude was labelled a supply-chain risk.

Even so, Anthropic’s position appears to have made the model more attractive to many consumers, according to available data.

App intelligence firm Appfigures says downloads of Claude’s mobile app in the United States continue to outpace those of ChatGPT. The latest figures from March 2 show Claude recording 149,000 daily downloads, while ChatGPT had 124,000, based on the firm’s estimates.

Download numbers indicate how many people are installing an app for the first time. Still, active-user figuresprovider a clearer picture of how many users are actually engaging with it.

On that measure, another market intelligence company, Similarweb, found that Claude’s app across iOS and Android devices reached 11.3 million daily active users on March 2. That represents a 183% increase from the start of the year, when daily usage was about 4 million, and a rise from 5 million daily active users at the beginning of February.

That growth has pushed Claude ahead of other AI apps in daily active users, including Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, though it still trails bigger competitors such as ChatGPT. Part of the reason is that Claude’s surge in usage started later in the month, around the same time reports emerged about Anthropic’s tense dealings with the Pentagon. If the pattern continues through March, its ranking could move even higher.

ChatGPT, however, still leads the broader market by a wide margin. On March 2, its daily active users across iOS and Android stood at 250.5 million.

Similarweb also says Claude’s web traffic has been rising.

Although it still lags well behind other top AI providers in overall web traffic, Claude’s web traffic increased 43% month over month in February and 297.7% year over year. Some of that momentum may have come at ChatGPT’s expense, as ChatGPT’s web traffic fell 6.5% month over month during the same period. Gemini saw a smaller increase of 2.1%, which marked slower growth than in earlier months.

Anthropic has also highlighted Claude’s momentum, noting that its AI chatbot is now attracting more than 1 million signups per day after becoming a signups app on the U.S. App Store over the past weekend, a position it continues to hold. The app is also ranked No. 1 in 15 other countries, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, and the U.K.

The company also said Claude has set a new internal signup record every day since the start of signup week in every country where the chatbot is available.

At the same time, ChatGPT’s app uninstalls have been increasing, according to an earlier report.

Anthropic said it does not comment on third-party data, but a spokesperson said daily active users have more than tripled since the beginning of 2026, while paid subscribers have doubled.