Anthropic Under Fire: Massive Claude Outage Coincides with Geopolitical and Corporate Crisis
On June 18, the Claude chatbot, Anthropic's flagship product, experienced a major outage. Users worldwide found the service simply stopped responding and loading messages. According to status aggregator data, the number of complaints surged around 10:03 AM Moscow time, peaking at over 770 reports in a single day.
Technical Glitches Amid a Political Storm
The outage affected both the web interface and the mobile app. Some free-tier users received messages about insufficient computing power. This is already the second major incident this month: in early June, Claude showed instability affecting the Claude Code platform. However, the current outage comes at an extremely tense time for the company.
This week, Anthropic found itself at the center of several events. JPMorgan Chase, following Goldman Sachs' lead, banned its employees in Hong Kong from accessing Claude models. The reason was wording in the licensing agreement that the bank deemed risky amid growing US-China tensions in AI and data security.
Moreover, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent a letter to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei demanding a halt to exports of the Mythos and Fable models to foreign nationals, citing the risk of their use by military intelligence from China, Russia, and other countries.
Diplomatic Dinner and Europe's Caution
Against this backdrop, on June 17, a G7 leaders' dinner took place in Évian-les-Bains, attended by heads of leading AI companies, including Amodei, Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind). Officially, the discussion focused on stimulating economic growth, but according to industry insiders, the Trump administration's dispute with Anthropic remained the "elephant in the room." Notably, during a bilateral meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Trump, the issue of Anthropic was not even raised.
Europe is taking a cautious stance. Brussels has not received an official notification from the US regarding export controls, and EU Technology Chief Henna Virkkunen emphasized that countermeasures should not be discriminatory toward partners.
My analysis: The Claude outage is not just a technical inconvenience. It is a symptom of a deep crisis of trust in Anthropic amid geopolitical turbulence. When Wall Street's largest banks block your product and the US administration demands export restrictions, the market begins to question: how sustainable is the company's business model? Investors should closely monitor developments at the G7 summit—it is there that the decision will be made whether Anthropic becomes an outcast or finds a path to cooperation.