Anthropic might have been banned from Department of War and US federal contracts, but it seems to have more than made up for it with a surge in popularity of its consumer app.
New data from SimilarWeb shows Claude’s daily active users on iOS and Android have grown roughly 5x since October 2025, climbing from around 2 million daily users to over 11 million by the end of February 2026. The chart is unambiguous: steady growth through the back half of 2025, followed by a near-vertical spike in the final week of February — the precise moment Anthropic’s confrontation with the Trump administration exploded into public view.
The Pentagon Effect
For most of 2025, Claude’s mobile user numbers were growing, but modestly. The app sat in a 1.5 to 3 million daily active user range through the spring and summer, with gradual improvement through the autumn as Anthropic’s enterprise business accelerated. Then, in the final days of February 2026, the line goes almost straight up.
The trigger is not hard to identify. Dario Amodei published his account of the Pentagon dispute on February 26. Within 48 hours, President Trump had called Anthropic “radical left” and “woke” on Truth Social, Pete Hegseth had designated the company a supply chain risk to national security, and the story had become one of the most widely covered tech controversies in years. The result: Claude hit number one on the App Store, overtaking ChatGPT and Google Gemini, and surpassed Grok and DeepSeek in web traffic for the first time.
More Than A News Cycle
The more interesting question is whether this is durable. Traffic spikes driven by controversy typically fade once the news cycle moves on. But there are reasons to think Anthropic’s surge has structural legs.
The company’s underlying business was already accelerating hard before the Pentagon dispute. Anthropic’s revenue run rate now stands at $19 billion, up from a fraction of that a year ago, driven by enterprise adoption across legal, finance, and consulting. Business subscriptions have quadrupled since January 1. The consumer surge is therefore landing on top of genuine product momentum — not a hollow brand.
Anthropic has also moved quickly to capitalise on the influx. The memory import feature launched almost simultaneously with the controversy, allowing new users to carry their preferences and context over from ChatGPT in a single copy-paste — directly reducing the switching cost for anyone arriving out of curiosity.
The Irony
The Trump administration’s goal in going after Anthropic was to punish the company for defying the Pentagon. The designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was meant to signal danger, not drive downloads. Instead, the government’s language — “radical left,” “woke,” “Leftwing nut jobs” — appears to have functioned as an endorsement among the consumer demographic most likely to be using AI assistants.
It is a dynamic with few precedents in the tech industry: a company losing a major government contract and gaining millions of users in the same week. Whether those users convert to paid subscribers will determine whether the chart’s near-vertical February spike becomes a new baseline or a footnote.
The next few weeks of data will be telling.