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Worse, OpenAI's app began to collect one-star reviews on the App Store and the Play Store. Last Saturday, the number of negative reviews with a single star jumped by more than 770%… before surging by over 1000% on both stores. Behind this sudden disapproval lies the agreement between OpenAI and the U.S. military. The startup indeed signed an agreement with the Pentagon allowing the military to use its AI technologies in the context of its operations. Although Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, assures that « technical guarantees » have been taken to prevent abuse, the announcement caused a stir. It was exactly at the time the startup announced the agreement that uninstallations started to multiply.

Also read: « Claude will remain ad-free » – Anthropic mocks ads in ChatGPT

Why is Claude thriving while ChatGPT is struggling

In parallel, Claude, the generative AI from Anthropic, is gaining popularity. A few days before OpenAI reached an agreement with the U.S. government, Anthropic firmly refused to open its generative AI to the military, despite pressure from the Department of Defense. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, stated that he cannot, in good conscience, allow the military to use AI « for mass surveillance purposes ». The disagreement solidified when the military used a militarized version of Claude, integrated into a drone system, during the raid aimed at capturing Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. In response, Donald Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic's products.

After the startup stood up to the Pentagon, the Claude app became the number one most downloaded app in the United States. As soon as Anthropic opposed the Trump administration, Claude downloads surged by more than 50%. The total daily downloads of Claude in the United States then surpassed those of ChatGPT for the first time on February 28th, in the hours following the controversial agreement between OpenAI and the Pentagon.

Also read: Anthropic, the AI giant targeted by a new $3 billion lawsuit

For several days, the Claude app remained at the top of the U.S. App Store, rising by about twenty positions in a few weeks. Driven by the battle between Anthropic and Washington, Claude has even become the number one free app for iPhone in at least six countries outside the US, namely Belgium, Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, Norway, and Switzerland. Anthropic adds that daily sign-ups have broken records since January.

Rising Sign-Ups and Global Outage for Claude

Sign-ups have reached unprecedented levels, with approximately 60% more sign-ups on the free user side and a doubling of paid subscriptions, explains an Anthropic spokesperson to TechCrunch. This influx of users even caused a global outage of Claude's services during the day on Monday, March 2, 2026. Claude.ai, Claude Code, and platform.claude.com displayed 500/504 errors, black screens, or blank pages, while the conversation history was completely inaccessible.

The outage lasted most of the day. According to Anthropic, the outage is due to an « unprecedented demand » that forced them to take offline the interfaces intended for the general public to protect professional solutions. The Anthropic team « is working to address the strong demand encountered for Claude in recent days ».

To explain Claude's massive success, we also cite the numerous new features announced by Anthropic in the past few weeks. The startup has notably unveiled Claude Sonnet 4.6, a major update to its reference AI model, Claude Opus 4.6, Remote Control for Claude Code, advanced security tools and vulnerability research tools, and PowerPoint, Notion, Excel integrations with programmed AI agents and new plugins.

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Source : TechCrunch