Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads have been paying off. The commercials featured darkly comedic scenarios of people seeking advice from chatbots, only to be steered to “cougar” dating sites and height-boosting insoles. In the days since the ads aired, Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude has climbed from number 41 on the U.S. App Store to become a top 10 app. As of Friday, Claude sits at number seven, which is its highest rank to date. This suggests its “no ads” pitch resonates strongly with users.
According to new data from market intelligence provider Appfigures, Claude’s U.S. downloads across both iOS and Android totaled an estimated 148,000 from Sunday through Tuesday. That is the most recent data available. That figure represents a 32 percent increase from the preceding three days, Thursday through Saturday, where downloads totaled approximately 112,000.
Claude’s daily average number of downloads from Sunday through Tuesday was 49,200. This is up 32 percent from the usual Sunday through Tuesday average of 37,400 per day. The numbers suggest that Anthropic’s Super Bowl commercials, combined with Anthropic’s recent release of its new Opus 4.6 model, worked to drive attention to Claude’s app and its key differentiator from ChatGPT. ChatGPT rolled out ads to free users this week, just as Anthropic’s ads had warned.
As a result, Claude’s app is gaining more attention than it did when it first debuted on mobile. The consumer-focused AI app arrived on iOS in May 2024 to a fairly tepid reception. ChatGPT had beaten it to market on mobile devices and had grown to nearly half a million installs in its first five days. By comparison, Claude had only pulled in 157,000 total global downloads within its first week and didn’t reach a rank higher than number 55 on the U.S. App Store.
Globally, Claude saw some gains this past week, too. Overall worldwide downloads of Claude across both the App Store and Google Play grew 15 percent from Sunday to Tuesday versus last Thursday to Saturday. However, this was less than half the gains seen in the U.S., Appfigures noted.