By Sanya Mansoor
Publication Date: 2026-03-02 20:31:00
The Claude AI model has become increasingly popular after being blacklisted by the Pentagon last week over ethical concerns.
Claude climbed to No. 1 on Apple’s list of top free apps in the US on Saturday, dethroning OpenAI’s ChatGPT, just a day after the Pentagon used OpenAI to provide AI to secret military networks. The bot’s app climbed the iPhone app charts in the UK, but failed to prevail against ChatGPT. Claude also made its way up the Android charts in the US and UK, with ChatGPT leading the way, according to data from Sensor Tower.
Claude and other apps from startup Anthropic suffered outages early Monday as the company called “unprecedented demand for Claude” over the last week. According to Downdetector, an online platform that monitors service outages, more than 1,400 users reported disruptions just after 6 a.m. ET. At 11 a.m. ET, Anthropic announced that the incident had been resolved.
Even as the company ran afoul of the Pentagon, business boomed. “Every day…
