In the USA, users are massively deleting ChatGPT from their phones: last week, this trend reached almost 300% compared to previous periods.
And this was the result of a loud public scandal.
Once upon a time, there was a company called Anthropic, working in the trendy industry of Large Language Models (often referred to as “artificial intelligence”). And this company developed its own model and called it Claude.
The American military used this model for some time. And they liked it so much that the Pentagon had signed a $200 million contract with Anthropic in the summer of 2025.
But the contract had clauses about the possibilities of mass surveillance of US citizens and the potential development of autonomous weapons. These clauses were completely unacceptable to the developing company. The Pentagon likewise categorically refused to remove those clauses. It reached a point where Anthropic threatened the Secretary of War Hegetset – calling it a “threat to the national security supply chain.” Even President Trump publicly labeled Anthropic (a company with a capitalization of $380 billion) as “left-wing radicals.”
But Trump’s threats had a reverse effect, and one day after all this was made public, the number of downloads of Claude instantly increased by 37%. And the next day – by 51%.
Instead of Anthropic, the Pentagon quickly signed a contract with Open AI, the developer of ChatGPT. The aforementioned toxic clauses did not become an obstacle for Open AI. They thus showed they were fully ready to provide user data to the government and didn’t care that modern LLMs are still insufficiently reliable for use in autonomous weapons.
The scandal quickly spread in the media, leading to massive deletions of ChatGPT and even more massive installations of Claude.
Currently, Claude is in the top spot for downloads in the AppStore. As of early March 2026, there are about 300 million users of Claude. ChatGPT still has 800 million. But the numbers are rapidly approaching each other from both sides.
Just a cool business story, you might say? Well, it depends on how you look at it.
The bottom line of this scandal is: essentially, one company refused to hand over users’ personal data to the government, while another gladly agreed. At the very least, it involved the geolocation and browsing history of users.
In a free country, where free people take the protection of their personal data seriously, this led to serious losses on one side and a surge in popularity on the other.
What’s happening with us?
While in the USA a company was criticized for merely planning (!) to give data to the government, in Ukraine, the government, which stores citizens’ data, has itself developed an app and forcibly drives millions of citizens into it (not providing certain state electronic services in any other way). And it doesn’t report on data usage. Moreover, it creates maximum obstacles for the transparency of these processes.
And for most Ukrainians, it’s normal, nothing much. Well, “the government already knows everything about me,” “I’m an ordinary person, I have nothing to hide.”
It’s as if a neighbor was fined for shouting at his wife, while next door a man beats his wife daily, everyone knows it, but even the victim herself thinks it’s fine. Although she sees and knows that things are different with the neighbors. Yet it’s still fine for her.
It can be understood why military and semi-military apps are installed in Ukraine during martial law; there is some logic in it. Not always correct and often poorly implemented, but at least theoretically, it’s there.
But why Ukrainians have been living for 6 years in the “convenient” electronic shackles of Diya-Mriya and are not even aware that it’s somehow harming them, I just cannot understand.
The direct conflict of interest is obvious: the state on one hand stores and supposedly “protects” citizens’ data, but on the other hand, takes it, spreads it totally uncontrolled, discloses, and abuses it. And it only worries a few specialists, – to everyone else, it’s “meh.” “Ordinary people” shove anything into their smartphone and then wonder “how do they know everything about me?!”
Isn’t it a bit primitive-cave thinking? When the victim admires and justifies their tormentor – this is called “Stockholm syndrome.”
And why do people with such thinking need the European Union anyway?
