Claude Surges in User Growth and Enterprise Adoption as Anthropic Challenges Pentagon Restrictions

Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant is experiencing a sharp increase in mobile downloads and daily active users following the company’s dispute with the U.S. Department of Defense, which designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after CEO Dario Amodei refused to allow the company’s AI systems to be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.

Market intelligence firm Appfigures reported that Claude’s U.S. mobile downloads recently reached approximately 149,000 daily installs, surpassing ChatGPT, which recorded about 124,000 daily downloads. Data from Similarwebalso indicated that Claude’s mobile daily active users climbed to 11.3 million, representing a 183% increase since the start of 2026. Despite the surge, ChatGPT remains the dominant AI application with more than 250 million daily active users across mobile platforms.

Anthropic said Claude has recently generated over one million new sign-ups per day, with the app reaching the top position on the U.S. App Store and ranking first in multiple international markets including Canada, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Singapore.

At the same time, major technology platforms including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services confirmed that Claude will remain available to their enterprise customers for non-defense applications. Microsoft said Anthropic models will continue to be offered through platforms including Microsoft 365, GitHub, and Azure AI Foundry, while Google Cloud confirmed similar availability for its customers.

Separately, Anthropic collaborated with Mozilla to test the security capabilities of its AI models. Using Claude Opus 4.6, the company identified 22 vulnerabilities in Firefox, including 14 classified as high severity, during a two-week security review of the browser’s codebase.

James Dargan

James Dargan is a writer and researcher at The AI Insider. His focus is on the AI startup ecosystem and he writes articles on the space that have a tone accessible to the average reader.

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