Claude’s daily active users are increasing on mobile devices, as are its new applications, following the company’s fallout with the Pentagon. After Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to allow the government to use its AI systems to monitor more Americans or to power fully autonomous weapons, the provider of the AI model behind Claude was flagged as a supply chain risk.
However, the Anthropic shape made many buyers like the model, the data suggests.
App intelligence provider Appfigures reports that US downloads of Claude’s mobile app continue to outpace those of ChatGPT. The latest figures as of March 2 show Claude with 149,000 daily downloads, compared to 124,000 for ChatGPT, company estimates show.
While download statistics provide a window into how many new users are installing an app for the first time, active users provide insight into how many people are actually using it.
Meanwhile, another market intelligence provider, Similarweb, found that Claude’s app on iOS and Android devices saw 11.3 million active users on March 2, up 183% from the beginning of the year when usage was around 4 million, and up from 5 million daily active users in early February.
Claude’s growth puts it ahead of other AI apps with everyday users, such as Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, but not other top competitors like ChatGPT. This is because Claude’s deployment began later in the month, coinciding with news of Anthropic’s intense negotiations with the Pentagon. If these trends continue through March, they may be higher.
Yes, ChatGPT still dominates the market by a significant margin, as its daily active users on March 2 were 250.5 million across iOS and Android.
Similaweb also reports that Claude’s web traffic has been growing.
Although it lags far behind other top AI providers in terms of web traffic, Claude’s web traffic increased 43% month-on-month in February, and is up 297.7% year-over-year. At least some of this growth may be due to the cost of ChatGPT, whose web traffic fell 6.5% month-over-month during the same period. Gemini also saw a slight bump of 2.1%, which is slower growth than previous months.
Anthropic itself has been praising Claude’s progress, noting that its AI chatbot now sees more than 1 million signups a day after the app became No. 1 in the US App Store last weekend – a position it held. The app is also number 1 in 15 other countries, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Switzerland, UK
The company also noted that Claude has broken its daily subscription record since the beginning of last week in all countries where Claude is available.
The release of the ChatGPT app, meanwhile, has been growing, a previous report found.
Anthropic said it does not comment on third-party data, but a spokesperson noted that daily active users have tripled since early 2026, and paid subscribers have doubled.
Updated with comments by Anthropic after publication.
