Anthropic poaches users from rival chatbots with easier migration
The controversy over Anthropic’s negotiations with the Pentagon has driven increased interest in Claude.
Negotiations between the Department of Defense and Anthropic collapsed after a deadline for an agreement expired without a deal. The Pentagon had pressed the company to loosen certain restrictions on how its AI systems could be used. Anthropic declined and kept its existing policy limits in place.
Following the breakdown, the Pentagon designated the company a supply chain risk, limiting future contracting and procurement.
“Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit the use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement.
“However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now,” concluded Amodei.
Hours after Anthropic was excluded, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced his company had secured a Pentagon contract to provide AI for classified military systems. OpenAI’s decision to accept the demands that Anthropic rejected drew criticism from the public and users, leading the company to announce revisions to certain contract provisions.
New memory import tool eases migration
It appears that the situation has not harmed the company. On the contrary, users have begun shifting to Claude in large numbers, with the app climbing toward the top of the free app rankings in the U.S. App Store in recent days. The surge in users likely contributed to the outage on Monday, March 2.
Anthropic moved to attract users of rival chatbots, promoting a feature that allows them to transfer conversation history and preferences from platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot to Claude.
The memory import feature is available across all Claude plans, including Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise, on web and desktop versions.
To simplify migration, Anthropic developed a dedicated prompt available on its support pages that enables users to collect relevant context from another AI assistant within a single conversation.
Users can then paste the exported output into Claude’s memory import tool. “Once the import is complete, you’ll see your updated memory within 24 hours,” the company noted.