Claude has had an absolutely explosive rise in popularity and honestly it's a perfect storm of great product and perfect timing.
Anthropic released several Super Bowl commercials that mocked ChatGPT's decision to show ads to its users and promised Claude would never do the same, which were funny and effective and got under the skin of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
But beyond marketing, Claude Code, their command-line tool for developers, went viral over the 2025 Christmas holidays when people had time to experiment with it, with non-programmers starting to use it for vibe coding and building apps without traditional coding knowledge.
The product is legitimately excellent for coding tasks and reasoning, and the ethical stance the company took regarding the Pentagon dispute gave them mainstream visibility. I think Claude resonated because people are tired of the usual big tech playbook and Claude offered something different.