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

Anthropic may have lost its business relationship with the US government, but it has gained enough popularity to earn the top spot in the App Store’s ranking of the best free apps. At the top, Claude beat ChatGPT and Google Gemini, which occupy the second and third places respectively in the ranking of Apple’s free applications.

The sudden increase in user downloads is not random. This follows the announcement that President Trump has banned any federal agency from using Anthropic’s Claude or other AI tools after the AI ​​company refused to budge on certain guardrails. After refusing to allow its AI models to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, Anthropic was also threatened with a “supply chain risk” label by Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. This very public argument led to a wave of user support that ultimately allowed Claude to dethrone OpenAI’s ChatGPT on the App Store as the most downloaded free app.

While OpenAI took Anthropic’s place after reaching a deal with the Department of Defense, the CEO still shared his thoughts on the debacle during an AMA on On top of that, the OpenAI CEO called Anthropic’s blacklist an “extremely scary precedent,” but he’s still “hoping for a much better resolution.”