A concerted effort to ditch ChatGPT for Claude has emerged online, even affecting reddit fan forums r/ChatGPT, r/OpenAI and the broader r/Singularity, which on Sunday were brimming with posts about moving to Claude.
Top of the list
As a result, Anthropic’s chatbot has climbed to number one, top of the list for productivity apps in the App Store — beating out both OpenAI and Gemini. Last week, it was hovering around 50th.
The switching effort got help over the weekend from a tweet by Katy Perry, transmitting news of her new Claude account to her 85 million followers. On x.com, «cancel ChatGPT» returns around ten posts per hour.
Never objected to military use
The curious turn to this news is that Anthropic has had no qualms about offering its AI for military service, and has been in classified use by the Pentagon since June 2024. It is even being used today in the current conflict in the Middle East.
OpenAI has posted an announcement regarding its Pentagon use, claiming to have made progress over the deal offered to Anthropic. There will be red lines for internal surveillance, they say, and fully autonomous weapons are off limits.
Weekend Twitter action
Sam Altman also hosted an AMA on x.com over the weekend, in the spirit of openness and trying to stop the bleeding:
Three general things from this AMA:
1. There is more open debate than I thought ther ewould be, at least in this part of Twitter, about whether we should prefer a democratically elected government or unelected private companies to have more power. I guess this is something…
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 1, 2026
The spat over the Pentagon deals seems to boil down to whether unelected private companies should control AI, or if they should ruled by the laws of the land, enacted by democratically elected lawmakers.
Read more: Windows Central, Gizmodo, Engadget.
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