Anthropic’s Claude chatbot goes down for thousands of users
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Anthropic’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot Claude experienced service disruptions on March 2.
PHOTO: KELSEY MCCLELLAN/NYTIMES
Anthropic’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot Claude experienced service disruptions on March 2, with thousands of users reporting issues, according to monitoring website Downdetector.
The cause of the outage is not clear. Anthropic said there were “elevated errors” across some services in a status update, and said it began investigating the issue at 11.49am in London.
The outage has affected those who use the Claude chatbot as well as Anthropic’s coding service Claude Code, according to the company’s status page. Those running apps that have integrated Claude are not experiencing disruption, the company said.
The Claude app was not working for logged-out users, while social media users posted screenshots on X of an error page describing a “temporary service disruption”.
In Singapore, reports of service disruptions peaked at about 7.45pm, according to Downdetector, before tapering off later in the evening. At its height, 215 reports were logged.
“We have identified that the Claude API is working as intended,” Anthropic wrote on its status page. “The issues we are seeing are related to Claude.ai and with the login/logout paths.”
A representative for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The disruption comes as Anthropic experiences a surge in new users, driven by the company’s public relations feud with the Pentagon.
US defence officials want unfettered use of the company’s artificial intelligence tools for military purposes, while Anthropic has refused to comply. Specifically, the company does not want its tools used to surveil US citizens, or for autonomous lethal strikes without a human in the loop.
The fight threatens to engulf Anthropic, even if it has popular support, after the Trump administration ordered federal agencies to stop using the company’s software, and it was designated a supply-chain risk by the Pentagon.
The Claude app has topped Apple Inc.’s App Store for the past few days. Silicon Valley workers have also supported the company’s stance.
Mr Sam Altman, founder of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, announced the company had struck a deal with the Pentagon hours after Mr Trump’s order. BLOOMBERG
