OpenAI's Pentagon deal sparked a credibility crisis after staff learned leadership has no control over military decisions. ChatGPT uninstalls jumped 295% as users switched to Anthropic's Claude, which became the top-downloaded app. Anthropic's revenue projections now hit $20 billion annually, but the Pentagon labeled it a supply-chain risk on the same day it reopened military talks.
On February 28th, OpenAI announces an agreement with the Department of War. They're publicly telling people that they have the same red lines, the same safety standards as Anthropic. And then according to this article from Bloomberg, Altman tells staff OpenAI has no say over Pentagon decisions. The fallout from that was pretty quick for OpenAI. Claude capitalized on this fallout and released an easy way to switch to Claude without starting over. So they were seemingly making it very easy to get rid of your OpenAI account and move over to Claude. Instead. And well, it worked. Earlier this week, TechCrunch put out this article: users are ditching ChatGPT for Claude. And guess what happened next? Claude jumped to be the number one most downloaded app in the App Store. Now, prior to this, they'd been like way down, like they weren't even in like the top 10. And ChatGPT uninstalls surged by 295%. People were like, OpenAI, we don't trust you anymore, we're out. Anthropic is on track to generate annual revenue of almost $20 billion, more than doubling its run rate from last year. And then check this out. This is a graph put out by RAMP where we can see the blue here is all OpenAI. The orange is Anthropic. On March 4th, The Information put out an article from leaked internal company memos from Anthropic. The real reasons the Department of War and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven't donated to Trump, while OpenAI's Greg Brockman have donated a lot. We haven't given dictator-style praise to Trump. While Sam has. We have supported AI regulation, which is against their agenda. We've told the truth about a number of AI policy issues like job displacement, and we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce safety theater for the benefit of employees. Now, on March 5th, Anthropic's chief is now back in talks with the Pentagon about an AI deal. But also on March 5th, the Pentagon officially notified Anthropic that it's deemed a supply chain risk. Anthropic does say, we do not believe this action is legally sound. And we see no choice but to challenge it in court. I don't know much about the law and all the legalities of this, so I can't really speak into this too much, but my gut tells me this supply chain risk designation will probably not stick. But I don't know. I mean, I've been surprised by a lot of this stuff before.
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