Could fighting with the Pentagon be the best thing that ever happened to Anthropic? On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s designation of Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” looked like it could pose an existential threat to the AI firm. Not only could it lose customers, but, depending on how broadly the designation is interpreted, it could force Anthropic’s cloud providers Amazon and Google to cut ties with the firm, jeopardizing its ability to even operate. Axios on Monday published a report suggesting the $60 billion in venture funding raised by Anthropic was now at risk. But there’s a very good chance Anthropic will come out of this stronger. For one thing, its principled stance is proving popular with consumers, while OpenAI‘s decision to strike a Pentagon deal seems to be having the opposite effect. On Monday, Anthropic’s Claude chatbot was at the top of the iOS free app rankings . In late January, before it ran a Super Bowl ad, it ranked 131 in the U.S., according to data cited by CNBC . Meanwhile, a massive surge of people uninstalled the ChatGPT app from their phones on Saturday, TechCrunch reported. People in tech are applauding Anthropic's position: Khosla Ventures partner Ethan Choi said on The Information’s TITV on Monday, “I admire Dario and Anthropic for what they’ve done, which is [to] take a stand for the values that they actually incorporated the company on.” (Khosla Ventures was an early OpenAI investor).