GoKawiilOpenAI’s recent contract with the U.S. Department of Defense sparked backlash from users, briefly pushing Claude to the top of the App Store. Here are the details.
Claude had reached the top of the App Store on March 1st
If you’ve been following the standoff between Anthropic and the U.S. government, you know that Anthropic was designated a supply chain risk after refusing to accept two clauses in a multi-million-dollar contract with the Department of Defense.
On the same day the Pentagon’s deadline for Anthropic to accept the terms expired, OpenAI swooped in and signed the contract instead.
Even though OpenAI claimed to have secured the safeguards Anthropic wanted but failed to obtain from the DoD, this quickly sparked backlash among users, many of whom uninstalled ChatGPT.
In a matter of days, ChatGPT uninstalls reportedly grew by 295%, while Claude reached the top of the U.S. App Store for the first time on March 1st.
The backlash, however, was short-lived. Earlier today, ChatGPT reclaimed the top spot on the U.S. App Store, followed by Claude in second place and Google Gemini in third.
The LLM war heats up
This controversy couldn’t have come at a worse time for OpenAI, as its once-comfortable lead in the LLM market has shrunk considerably over the past year.
According to a report published last month by Apptopia, ChatGPT’s share of daily U.S. users fell from 69.1% in January 2025 to 45.3% in January 2026. During the same period, Google’s Gemini grew from 14.7% to 25.1%.
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