ChatGPT uninstalls spike 295% after Pentagon deal as Claude takes No. 1

OpenAI thought it was just signing another lucrative government contract. Mobile users clearly had other plans.

On Saturday, February 28, news broke that OpenAI had struck a deal with the U.S. Department of Defense, recently rebranded under the Trump administration as the Department of War. According to intelligence provider Sensor Tower, U.S. uninstalls of the ChatGPT mobile app instantly surged by 295% day-over-day.

For context, ChatGPT’s typical daily uninstall rate had hovered around 9% over the past month. That is not background noise. That is a full-blown user revolt.

A weekend of rage-deletes and one-star reviews

Users did not just delete the app; they made sure OpenAI heard about it on their way out.

Sensor Tower noted that one-star reviews for ChatGPT spiked 775% on Saturday. On Sunday, those negative reviews jumped another 100% day-over-day, while five-star reviews plummeted by 50%.

New signups took a direct hit as well. After growing 14% on Friday before the announcement, ChatGPT’s U.S. daily downloads dropped 13% on Saturday and fell another 5% on Sunday.

Claude says no to the Pentagon and takes the crown

While OpenAI took heat, its chief rival Anthropic sat right across the street and scooped up all the running traffic.

Anthropic had publicly declined to sign the very same Pentagon contract. The company stated it could not agree to terms due to deep concerns that AI could be turned toward mass surveillance of American citizens or deployed in fully autonomous weaponry before the technology is remotely safe.

Consumers visibly rewarded that stance. Sensor Tower tracked a 37% bump in Claude's U.S. downloads on Friday, followed by another 51% surge on Saturday. By Saturday, Claude had leapt over 20 spots from its February 22 position to take the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store, where it remained as of Monday, March 2.

Appfigures painted an even wilder picture, estimating Claude’s U.S. Saturday downloads surged 88% day-over-day. More importantly, it reported that Claude’s daily U.S. downloads officially surpassed ChatGPT’s for the first time in history. Claude also captured the No. 1 free iPhone app ranking in six other nations, including Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Norway, and Luxembourg.

Similarweb added that Claude’s weekly U.S. downloads reached roughly 20 times its January run rate, though it cautioned other non-political factors could also be inflating the broader curve.

Why it matters

For the longest time, AI companies treated safety manifestos and defense lobbying as backroom corporate matters that retail app users would never care about. This weekend proved the opposite.

For users, this is a wake-up call to look around. If you are already uneasy about consumer AI being repurposed for autonomous warfare or domestic monitoring, Anthropic just made itself the most credible mainstream alternative. Claude has always held its own in coding and long-form writing, and now everyday users have a principled excuse to put it through its paces.

Anthropic played this hand masterfully. By publicly turning down military revenue, it traded a defense check for an avalanche of goodwill, top-of-funnel customer acquisition, and free App Store dominance across seven countries. It also boxed OpenAI into a nasty corner, forcing Sam Altman’s team to defend military alignment while paying consumer-brand taxes.

That said, rage-quitting an app is easy; staying away is the hard part. We think Anthropic now faces the real test: converting an overnight anti-war protest wave into loyal, long-term subscribers before consumer attention drifts back to feature parity.