Anthropic is doing its best to ride the wave of publicity following its blow-up with the US government.
Hot on the heels of Claude claiming the number one spot on Apple’s App Store — leapfrogging ChatGPT and Google Gemini in what appears to be a direct consequence of the company’s very public standoff with the Trump administration — Anthropic has launched a feature that makes it easier than ever for users of rival AI assistants to switch to Claude. The timing is unlikely to be accidental.
What The Feature Does
The new “Import Memory” feature, announced via Anthropic’s official Instagram account, allows users to bring their saved preferences and context from other AI providers directly into Claude. The mechanism is elegantly simple: Anthropic provides a ready-made prompt that users copy and paste into a conversation with their existing AI assistant — whether that’s ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other provider — asking it to export everything it knows about them. The resulting data is then pasted back into Claude, which updates its memory and picks up the conversation as if it had known the user all along.
“Switch to Claude without starting over,” the landing page reads. “Bring your preferences and context from other AI providers to Claude. With one copy-paste, Claude updates its memory and picks up right where you left off.”
The feature is available on all paid plans and can be accessed through the Capabilities section of the settings page.
Capitalising On A Surge In Attention
The launch comes at a moment when Anthropic has more eyes on it than at any previous point in its history. Claude’s ascent to the top of the App Store this week — above ChatGPT at number two and Google Gemini at number three — represented a remarkable consumer breakthrough for a company whose brand had previously been far more familiar to developers and enterprise customers than to mainstream users. The surge in downloads appeared to reflect a wave of public sympathy following the government’s aggressive response to Anthropic’s refusal to remove safety guardrails from its military contracts.
By launching the memory import feature now, Anthropic is making a direct play to convert that surge of curious new downloaders into long-term, paying subscribers. The logic is straightforward: someone who has spent months or years building up a personalised experience with a rival AI assistant faces a meaningful switching cost. Eliminating that friction — letting users arrive in Claude’s ecosystem already feeling known and understood — removes one of the most significant barriers to conversion.
A Direct Challenge To ChatGPT
While the feature is framed neutrally as supporting imports from “other AI providers,” it is hard to read it as anything other than a direct recruitment effort aimed at ChatGPT’s user base in particular. OpenAI’s memory feature has been one of its most popular additions in recent months, and the accumulated context that long-term users have built up there represents genuine lock-in. Anthropic is now explicitly telling those users that they don’t have to start from scratch.
The competitive dimension is all the sharper given the events of the past week. OpenAI struck a deal with the Department of War just as Anthropic was being frozen out of federal contracts — a move that earned Sam Altman a warm public endorsement from Under Secretary of War Emil Michael while Dario Amodei was being called a liar with a God complex by the same official. Anthropic is now channelling the consumer goodwill it appears to have earned from that confrontation into a feature that directly targets OpenAI’s installed base.
The Broader Strategy
Losing a major government contract is a significant commercial blow for any company, and Anthropic is no exception. The six-month transition period during which it must help the Department of War migrate to another provider will be a distraction and a cost at a time when the company needs to focus on growth. But the consumer market represents a very different opportunity — one where Anthropic’s reputation for safety and its recent stint as the underdog standing up to the most powerful administration in the world may prove to be genuine assets.
The import memory feature is a small but telling sign that Anthropic understands this moment and intends to make the most of it. The company may have lost Washington’s business. It appears determined to win over everyone else.