Anthropic faces a "dual crisis": Claude's server crash affected thousands of users, while simultaneously being deeply involved in the Pentagon's "shutdown" vulnerability.

Monitoring website Downdetector data shows that on Monday, there was a service interruption for the popular artificial intelligence chat Siasun Robot&Automation Claude, owned by Anthropic PBC, with thousands of users reporting access issues. The cause of the downtime is currently unclear. Anthropic stated in an update that some services were experiencing an "increase in error rate" and that they began investigating the issue at 19:49 Beijing time. According to the company's status page, this downtime affected users using Claude chat Siasun Robot&Automation and Anthropic's coding service Claude Code. The company stated that applications running with integrated Claude were not affected. The Claude application does not function properly for users who are not logged in, and social media users also posted screenshots of an error page on X platform showing "temporary service interruption." "We have confirmed that the Claude API is working as expected," Anthropic wrote on their status page. "The issue we are seeing is related to Claude.ai and the login/logout paths." Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment. This service interruption comes at a time when Anthropic is experiencing a surge in new users due to their public relations dispute with the Pentagon. US defense officials want to use the company's AI tools for military purposes without restrictions, but Anthropic refuses to comply. Specifically, the company does not want their tools to be used to monitor US citizens or for autonomous lethal strikes without human intervention. While Anthropic's stance may garner public support, this dispute could potentially engulf the company. The Trump administration had previously ordered federal agencies to stop using the company's software, and the Pentagon has listed it as a supply chain risk. In the past few days, the Claude application has consistently been at the top of the Apple App Store rankings. Silicon Valley workers also support the company's stance. Hours after Trump issued the order, Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced that the company had reached an agreement with the Pentagon.