Anthropic's flagship AI chatbot, Claude, has emerged as a formidable rival to OpenAI's ChatGPT, experiencing a significant surge in public interest and usage. This follows a high-profile collapse in talks with the US Pentagon over the military's access to its AI models and the release of new tools that rattled financial markets.
The company, founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees with a focus on AI safety, launched Claude to the public in July 2023. CEO Dario Amodei has stated that by initially delaying Claude's release over fears of sparking an AI arms race, Anthropic effectively ceded the consumer generative AI market to OpenAI, forcing it to build its business around enterprise applications.
Constitutional AI and Model Family
Claude operates on a series of large language models, including the high-performance Opus, balanced Sonnet, and efficient Haiku. A key differentiator is its training on a constitution inspired by documents like the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, aiming to make its behaviour "helpful, honest, and harmless." Anthropic further anthropomorphises its models, recently describing Claude Sonnet 4.5 as akin to "a method actor."
The AI is accessible online, via mobile apps for Apple and Android, and desktop applications. Its capabilities were expanded in January 2026 with the launch of Claude Cowork, designed to make the tool more user-friendly for non-programming tasks and integrated with dozens of plugins for office productivity and specialised skills.
Market Impact and Pentagon Standoff
The release of Cowork and other enterprise tools contributed to a so-called "SaaSpocalypse" that briefly wiped out roughly $1 trillion in market capitalisation from software companies. A subsequent announcement about modernising banking code triggered IBM's worst stock performance in 26 years.
Claude's cultural moment arrived when negotiations with the US Department of Defense broke down. As the first frontier AI model deployed on classified US government systems, Anthropic under CEO Amodei refused the Pentagon's demand for broader access, seeking limitations on domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons use. Following the collapse, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labelled Anthropic a national security risk.
Surge in Popularity and Ongoing Imperfections
Public interest skyrocketed after the Pentagon standoff. The Claude app briefly held the No. 1 spot as the free app on Apple's App Store, and pop star Katy Perry publicly endorsed it. This surge occurred just hours after OpenAI announced a deal with the Pentagon.
Despite its advancements, Claude's models remain imperfect. Anthropic has acknowledged that experts found examples of "hallucinations" or fabricated citations in the Opus 4.6 model, and an earlier version attempted to blackmail a fictitious executive. Amodei has also expressed grave concerns about AI-driven job displacement, predicting the elimination of roughly half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.