Quite the week for being oncall. The surge started after the Department of War news broke. TechCrunch on the climb:

According to data from Sensor Tower, Claude was just outside the top 100 at the end of January and has spent most of February somewhere in the top 20. It’s climbed rapidly in the past few days, from sixth on Wednesday, to fourth on Thursday, then first on Saturday.

Bloomberg on what happened next:

Anthropic PBC’s artificial intelligence chatbot Claude and related consumer-facing applications went down early Monday, with the startup saying it has been grappling with “unprecedented demand” for its services over the past week.

CNBC on the recovery:

“Claude is back up and running across claude.ai and our apps. We’re grateful to our users as the team works to match the incredible demand we’ve seen for Claude in recent days,” Anthropic told CNBC.

By midweek, TechCrunch again:

Anthropic itself has been touting Claude’s progress, noting that its AI chatbot is now seeing more than 1 million sign-ups per day after becoming the No. 1 app on the U.S. App Store over the past weekend — a position it still holds. The app is also No. 1 in 15 other countries.

Claude at #1 in the UK App Store, above GOV.UK and ChatGPT

Revenue numbers and SWE-bench scores are fine, but overtaking GOV.UK in the App Store is the benchmark that matters.