Codex installed 86 million in a single week? a16z chart debunked by Claude Code’s father

CoinWorld News reports that the well-known venture capital firm a16z posted a chart on social media yesterday, claiming that OpenAI’s Codex weekly installations surged to 86.10 million, “crushing” Anthropic’s Claude Code by a tenfold advantage. Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, responded with a post, pointing out that the data the other side cited was seriously distorted. He said the chart’s data source only counted downloads from npm (the Node.js package manager), while Claude Code had already fully switched to native installers several months ago, and that the vast majority of real installations were not captured by npm. He also revealed that last Thursday was Claude Code’s second-highest day ever for registrations, and since January 1 of this year, the product has achieved 15x growth. The total number of global software developers is only about 30 million, and weekly package-manager downloads of more than 80 million are typically generated by automated machine traffic pulling from CI/CD (continuous integration) pipeline automation. As more and more modern AI tools switch to native binary distribution, the old metric of assessing market share solely based on npm download counts is no longer applicable. a16z’s tweet has now been deleted.