Anthropic reports Claude outage as US government scrutiny grows

On Monday morning, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic experienced widespread disruptions that affected thousands of users who reported problems accessing its Claude services. The service outage seems to be affecting both the web interface Claude.ai and the developer tool Claude Code, leaving many users unable to access their accounts. In contrast, Anthropic stated that the Claude API is working as intended and has not experienced these disruptions, allowing developers using the API to continue their work without interruption.

According to the company’s status page, “The issues we are seeing are related to Claude.ai and with the login/logout paths,” which has prevented many users from successfully logging into their accounts. While Anthropic has not detailed the specific cause of the technical outage, the company asserted that it has identified the underlying issue and is currently implementing a fix to restore normal operations as quickly as possible for its users.

This technical instability follows a significant influx of users to Claude. Over this weekend, the chatbot app rose to the top of the App Store charts, overtaking its competitor chatbot ChatGPT. This sudden rise in user adoption represents a sharp shift for the application, which had previously spent a long period ranking below the top 20 on the App Store charts before experiencing this weekend’s surge in interest.

The technical issues also coincide with escalating regulatory tensions between Anthropic and the U.S. government. Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to stop using Anthropic products. This directive followed a dispute over safeguards designed to prevent the Department of Defense—the U.S. military branch—from using Anthropic’s AI models for “mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons.” The dispute highlights the growing friction between the company’s AI safety policies and U.S. government demands.

In connection with this dispute, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who serves as the head of the U.S. military, stated that he intends to designate Anthropic as a “supply-chain threat.” Anthropic, however, asserted that it has not yet received any formal notices regarding the “supply-chain threat” designation, and the company continues to monitor the situation as it develops.

Why it matters

The outage highlights the operational vulnerabilities of Claude just as the service gains consumer momentum. As Anthropic navigates both technical scaling challenges and regulatory friction with U.S. national security leadership, its ability to maintain service reliability will be critical to retaining its newly acquired user base.