Anthropic Under Fire: Massive Claude Outage Coincides with JPMorgan Block and US Export Sanctions
On June 18, Anthropic's chatbot Claude experienced a major outage affecting thousands of users worldwide. The service stopped responding, failed to load in browsers, and free-tier users received a message about insufficient computing capacity. According to independent status aggregators, the number of complaints surged around 10:03 Moscow time and peaked at over 770 reports within a day.
This is already the second major incident in a month: in early June, Claude faced a large-scale problem affecting the web interface, mobile app, and the Claude Code platform. The current outage continues a worrying trend of technical failures.
Pressure from all sides: banks, sanctions, and geopolitics
However, the technical failure is just the tip of the iceberg. This week, Anthropic found itself at the center of several geopolitical and regulatory storms. JPMorgan Chase, according to industry sources, banned its employees in Hong Kong from accessing Claude models, citing the wording of the licensing agreement. Goldman Sachs had previously taken a similar step. Both decisions fit into the context of growing tensions between the US and China in the field of AI technology, data security, and access to advanced computing tools.
The situation was exacerbated by a US export directive: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick ordered Anthropic to suspend the export of Mythos and Fable models to foreign nationals, citing the risk of their use by the military intelligence of China, Russia, and other countries.
Against this backdrop, on June 17, a G7 leaders' lunch took place with the participation of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and a meeting between the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA and the company was scheduled for June 18. Notably, Europe, unlike Washington, has taken a restrained stance: G7 diplomats emphasize a willingness to jointly reduce AI risks rather than through confrontation. EU technology official Henna Virkkunen noted that countermeasures should not be discriminatory towards partners.
Cryptalist Analysis: The Claude outage is not just a technical inconvenience but a symptom of a deep crisis of trust. Anthropic has found itself caught between the hammer of US regulatory pressure and the anvil of geopolitical tension. For a company positioning itself as a leader in safe AI, such a series of events is a serious blow to its reputation. Investors and users should closely monitor how Anthropic will engage with authorities and rebuild trust with corporate clients. Technical failures, compounded by political risks, could lead to a reassessment of partnerships and delays in the deployment of new models.