Anthropic’s Claude endured a major service disruption Monday morning as the artificial intelligence (AI) startup struggled to keep pace with “unprecedented demand” following a high-profile public showdown with the White House – and backlash against its rival, OpenAI.
The outage, which began shortly before 7 a.m. ET, left thousands of users without access to Claude.ai and developer tool Claude Code. According to the company’s status page, the issues were primarily centered on login paths and consumer-facing interfaces. While the enterprise API remained functional, Downdetector recorded a spike of nearly 2,000 error reports during the peak of disruption.
Anthropic confirmed that services were fully restored by 11 a.m. ET. “We’re grateful to our users while the team works to match the incredible demand we’ve seen for Claude in recent days,” the company said in a statement.
While the company identified the cause of Monday’s outage as a capacity issue, the incident highlights the growing pains of a platform suddenly thrust into the center of a national debate over the ethics of military AI. For now, Anthropic remains in the delicate position of defending its safety protocols while scaling its infrastructure to meet a record-breaking influx of new users.
The technical failure follows a chaotic weekend that saw Claude catapult to the top of Apple’s U.S. App Store charts, surpassing archrival ChatGPT. This surge in popularity appears to be a “Streisand Effect” byproduct of a heated federal dispute.
Last week, President Donald Trump ordered government agencies to cease using Anthropic products after the startup refused to roll back safeguards preventing its AI from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weaponry.
“The United States of America will never allow a radical left, woke company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars!” the President posted to Truth Social late Friday.
“There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels,” the president said, referring to the Department of Defense.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth subsequently moved to designate the company as a supply-chain threat. Subsequently, the State Department, Treasury Department, and federal housing agency have ceased using Anthropic products, according to Reuters. The State Department said it will switch to OpenAI.
Despite the administration’s mandate for agencies to transition to OpenAI’s GPT models within six months, the Wall Street Journal reported that Claude was still utilized during U.S. military strikes on Iran early Saturday morning.
The political friction has inadvertently served as a massive marketing vehicle for the San Francisco-based startup. Anthropic reported that daily signups have reached record highs, with their free user base growing by 60% since January.
