By Barry Buck – I’ve said it so many times it’s basically my catchphrase: “I don’t know how they do it, but Anthropic has the secret sauce. They’re just better than every single one of their competitors – and it’s not even close.”
Turns out the Pentagon agrees with me. So much so that when Anthropic told the Department of Defense they couldn’t have unfettered access to their models without safeguards against mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons, the US government threw an almighty tantrum.
The timeline is extraordinary. Anthropic negotiated for responsible guardrails – essentially asking that a human remain in the loop for weapons decisions and that their technology not be turned inward on American citizens.
The response? President Trump called them “leftwing nut jobs”. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk to national security. Federal agencies were ordered to stop using all Anthropic products.
OpenAI, ever the opportunist, swooped in with its own Pentagon deal within hours.
And then something remarkable happened. Claude – the app I use every single day to build automation solutions, write articles, draft legal documents, and generally run my professional life – shot to number one on Apple’s App Store. Not number 20. Not top 10. Number one. Overtaking ChatGPT. Daily sign-ups broke all-time records every day that week. Free users surged over 60% since January. Paid subscribers more than doubled. ChatGPT uninstalls spiked 295%. Even Katy Perry posted a screenshot of her Claude Pro subscription with a heart over it.
My initial take was simple: the secret sauce is so good that even the Pentagon will bully you for it.
An Anthropic representative noted that Claude was instrumental in disabling air defense systems during the capture of Maduro – and then asked why the government would take its own crown jewel and set it on fire.
The State Department has compared the AI race to the Space Race against the Soviets. So naturally, the move is to kneecap your best player?
But watching millions of users vote with their downloads, I’ve revised my take. This might be the greatest PR campaign in history – one Anthropic didn’t even plan. They simply did the right thing, and the market rewarded them for it. David Ogilvy would weep. You couldn’t buy this kind of brand loyalty. Turns out you just have to earn it.
Barry Buck is the chief technology officer of Saucecode and Roboteur architect
www.saucecode.tech