Anthropic's Claude recovers from outage following 'unprecedented' demand surge

By Emily Bary

Claude has been gaining more respect from users following ChatGPT backlash and the introduction of new coding tools

Claude and ChatGPT are battling for user attention.

Anthropic says its systems are operational again after a Monday morning outage that disrupted service of its Claude artificial-intelligence model.

"We're grateful to our users while the team works to match the incredible demand we've seen for Claude in recent days," an Anthropic spokesperson told MarketWatch.

The company previously said demand had been "unprecedented" in the last week, with Claude seeing record daily signups.

Meanwhile, on DownDetector, some users were still flagging access issues, although those reports peaked before 7 a.m. Eastern time and have since largely petered out.

See also: Anthropic's Claude tops App Store charts as backlash builds against OpenAI's ChatGPT

It's been an eventful stretch for Anthropic, whose prominence has grown in recent weeks thanks to new coding-related product releases that have sparked fears of AI disruption for not only traditional software stocks but also disparate industries like wealth management and trucking logistics.

The company is also dealing with the fallout of its dispute with the U.S. government, which decided to blacklist Anthropic on Friday and to designate the company a supply-chain risk from a national-security perspective. Anthropic had a contract with the Defense Department that was worth up to $200 million, but the company wanted to ensure that its technology wasn't used for mass surveillance or the development of autonomous weapons.

Don't miss: Trump blacklists Anthropic - and OpenAI swoops in

The supply-chain risk designation threatens to pose a financial problem for Anthropic, which recently raised $30 billion at a $380 billion postmoney valuation. Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives wrote over the weekend that "some enterprises could go pencils down on Claude deployments while this all gets settled in the courts."

One positive consequence of Anthropic's spat with the government is that the company has seemingly gained the favor of users over what's being perceived as its principled stance.

Claude rose to the top of Apple's App Store charts over the weekend following backlash against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

OpenAI struck a deal with the U.S. government after Anthropic's deal fell through, although the company said in a blog post that it believed its deployment had "more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic's."

-Emily Bary

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03-02-26 1134ET