Anthropic’s Claude grabs top spot in App Store after Trump’s ban

Anthropic may have lost out on doing business with the US government, but it’s gained enough popularity to earn the number one spot on the App Store’s Top Free Apps leaderboard. At the top, Claude beat out both ChatGPT and Google Gemini, which respectively sit at the second and third spots on Apple’s free apps charts.

The sudden surge in user downloads isn’t random. It follows news that President Trump has barred any federal agency from using Anthropic’s Claude or other AI tools after the AI company refused to concede on certain guardrails. After declining to have its AI models be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, Anthropic was also threatened with a “supply-chain risk” label by the Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The very public spat led to a wave of user support that finally allowed Claude to dethrone OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the App Store as the most downloaded free app.

While OpenAI has stepped into Anthropic’s shoes after agreeing to a deal with the Department of Defense, the CEO still offered up some thoughts about the debacle during an AMA on X. Even though Claude is a competing model, Sam Altman said that Anthropic’s supply-chain risk designation was “a very bad decision” that he’s hoping gets reversed. On top of that, OpenAI’s CEO called Anthropic’s blacklisting “an extremely scary precedent,” but he’s “still hopeful for a much better resolution.”