Anthropic Claude Outage: AI Chatbot Goes Offline Following Trump, Pentagon Blowup

Anthropic’s popular Claude AI chatbot platform has been dealing with an extended outage early Monday, with the company confirming issues and saying that it’s working on a fix.

Users began reporting widespread problems connecting to Claude shortly after 6 a.m. ET, per Down Detector, with Claude’s status page showing an acknowledgement of issues soon after. According to the latest update, Anthropic wrote, “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.”

“Claude is currently unavailable on our consumer-facing surfaces such as claude.ai and our apps,” a spokesperson told Decrypt. “The Claude API that powers businesses remains unaffected. Our team is working to restore full service and we’ll share updates as we have them. We appreciate everyone’s patience as we work to bring things back online while experiencing unprecedented demand for Claude over the last week.”

The extended downtime comes just days after President Trump instructed U.S. government agencies to stop using the AI platform following disagreements between Anthropic and the Pentagon over how the model could be used for wartime actions.

“The United States of America will never allow a radical left, woke company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday. “That decision belongs to your commander-in-chief and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our military.”

The U.S. government will have six months to phase out the software and instead use OpenAI’s GPT models, following an agreement announced later Friday. Despite the blowup, Anthropic’s Claude was used during U.S. strikes on Iran early Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Anthropic said that it’s seen a surge in demand for Claude since the public scuffle, with daily signups breaking records and free users rising 60% since January.

Editor’s note: This story is breaking and will be updated with more details.