Last week, Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude, was involved in a very public dispute with the U.S Pentagon for refusing to remove the AI’s safety guardrails to give the U.S military unrestricted access to use Claude to carry out large-scale domestic surveillance and create fully autonomous weapon systems.
As a result, President Trump tagged the company “left-wing lunatics” and subsequently ordered all federal agencies to boycott Claude. The defence department also labelled Claude a national risk and millions of users got locked out.
When Claude Went Dark
On the 2nd of March 2026, millions of users tried to open Claude but got an error message in response.
According to TechCrunch, the disruption began at 11:30 UTC and spread broadly across all regions. Nearly 2,000 users reported issues at the peak on Downdetector, and problems continued for hours. Most hit a wall at the login screen, while enterprises using Claude’s API directly stayed online.
After nearly three hours, Anthropic restored service: “Claude is back up and running across claude.ai and our apps.” No further technical explanation followed.
The Pentagon Deal That Started It All
The downtime didn’t happen out of nowhere. It came after a week-long battle between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of Defense.
For months, the U.S. Pentagon pushed Anthropic to allow the military to use Claude for “all lawful purposes”. Anthropic firmly refused based on two limits; no mass domestic surveillance and no fully autonomous weapons.
As a result, the Pentagon set a deadline of February 27 for Anthropic to either agree or face the consequences. Anthropic held firmly to its beliefs and became the first U.S. company to be labeled a supply chain risk, a title previously reserved for foreign adversaries.
Why Did Claude Actually Crash?
Despite all this, the reason is pretty straightforward. It’s because of a surge in users in very little time.
According to TechCrunch, Claude climbed to the top of the U.S. App Store ahead of ChatGPT and Gemini, with free signups breaking all-time records every day that week.
Additionally, it was just the log-in page and authentication infrastructure that experienced a lag, not the AI itself. Too many people joined in solidarity and crashed the portal.
Furthermore, while no evidence links the downtime to the Pentagon dispute, speculation spread fast online but Anthropic pointed firmly at demand, not politics.
What Happens Next?
The downtime might be over but the fight continues. President Trump has given the military six months to completely phase out Claude and OpenAI moved quickly to replace it.
Ultimately, service is restored and Claude is back online with more than a million new users. However, the broader implications of this dispute are still unfolding.
For the first time, the U.S. government used national security powers against an American AI company and the industry is watching closely to see what comes next.
