Anthropic's Super Bowl ads, which depict darkly comedic scenarios of people seeking advice from chatbots and then being directed to dating sites for “cougars” and height-enhancing inserts, are paying off. In a matter of days, Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude climbed from number 41 in the US App Store to become one of the top 10 most popular apps. As of Friday, Claude is in 7th place – its highest ever – suggesting that users are very fond of its “ad-free” proposition.
According to new data from a market intelligence provider Applicationsfrom Sunday to Tuesday, Claude had a total of about 148,000 downloads in the U.S. on iOS and Android, the latest data available. This represents an increase of 32% compared to the previous three days, from Thursday to Saturday, when total downloads were approximately 112,000.
Claude's average daily downloads from Sunday to Tuesday were 49,200, a 32% increase from the usual average Sunday to Tuesday downloads of 37,400 per day.
The numbers suggest that Anthropic's Super Bowl ads, combined with the recent launch of Anthropic's new Opus 4.6 model, have helped bring attention to Claude's app and its key differentiator from ChatGPT. The latter made the ads available to free users this week, just as Anthropic's ads warned.
As a result, Claude's app is receiving more attention than when it first debuted on mobile devices.
The consumer-focused AI app launched on iOS in May 2024 to a rather lukewarm reception. ChatGPT overtook it in the mobile market and achieved almost half a million installs in the first five days. By comparison, Claude had just 157,000 total downloads worldwide in its first week and did not reach position higher than 55 in the US App Store.
Claude also saw some gains globally last week. Overall Claude downloads worldwide on both the App Store and Google Play increased by 15% from Sunday to Tuesday compared to last Thursday and Saturday. However, as Appfigures noted, this represented less than half of the gains reported in the US.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
