Venture capital firm a16z posted a chart on social media yesterday claiming OpenAI's Codex racked up 86.1 million weekly installs — a 10x lead over Anthropic's Claude Code. But Claude Code's head, Boris Cherny, immediately called foul.】
Cherny pointed out that the chart's data source only counted downloads from npm (Node.js package manager). Claude Code switched to a native installer months ago, so the overwhelming majority of real installs were never captured by npm. He also revealed that last Thursday was Claude Code's second-highest registration day ever, and the product has grown 15x since January 1.
There are only about 30 million software developers in the world. A package manager logging over 80 million downloads in a week is typically CI/CD pipeline traffic — bots doing automated pulls. As more modern AI tools shift to native binary distribution, relying on npm downloads as a proxy for market share is an outdated metric.
a16z has since deleted the tweet.
