As the US administration continues to abandon Anthropic as a supplier, many meet the AI company’s ethical stance, creating an ‘unprecedented demand’ for Claude.
Anthropic’s Claude has quickly become a darling of AI enthusiasts, through development, research and business activity. Now it is facing the forces of the American administration which is threatening to completely stop it as a supplier after a dispute with the Pentagon about the so-called ‘red lines’ will not be crossed.
With many in Silicon Valley backing its relatively conservative stance, and mainstream users sending it to the top of Apple’s US charts in recent days for free downloads — beating OpenAI’s ChatGPT for the first time — its flagship Claude.ai and Claude Code apps went down for about three hours on Monday, prompting many to lament its absence. There are already reports of ongoing outages as we write, although the latest update says “fixes have been initiated and we are monitoring the results”.
In an unflattering post on LinkedIn yesterday, Silicon Republic regular contributor, AI aficionado Jonathan McCrea wrote: “Now I feel the same way about Claude being down as I used to think Twitter was down.”
A real boycott
Last night, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent added his voice to the actual US boycott of Anthropic products saying in X that his Department would stop the use of Anthropic products.
It follows an order from Donald Trump ordering US organizations to “stop” using the company’s AI products, and the Department of Defense calling Anthropic a “supply chain risk”, a role usually reserved for foreign suppliers from unfriendly states. Anthropic quickly called this a “legally absurd term,” and is expected to challenge the move in court.
Reuters also reports that it has seen memos to employees of the Department of Health and Human Services, asking them to switch to other AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Gemini, and the State Department saying it was changing the model to power its internal chatbot, StateChat, on OpenAI from Anthropic.
Financially it will be a big problem for Anthropic in the short term, but some analysts argue that it could be an important moment for Anthropic as it may be seen by many as an alternative to the AI giants.
Grok’s recent scandal has put a big question mark over xAI’s credentials and OpenAI’s Sam Altman clearly sees the reputational risk as he is quick to say that it is ensuring some oversight in its contract with the Pentagon.
At X yesterday Altman said these would ensure that OpenAI would not be “used for domestic surveillance of US citizens and nations”.
Background story
If you haven’t been following, Anthropic has drawn the ire of US officials after a disagreement with the Pentagon, where Anthropic refused to change its defenses related to using its AI with fully autonomous weapons, or mass surveillance of US citizens.
On Thursday (February 27) Dario Amodei of Anthropic issued an official statement saying that Anthropic believes that “in small cases, we believe that AI can undermine, rather than protect, democratic values”.
“Some uses are also outside the bounds of what today’s technology can do safely and reliably,” he said. “Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of Defense, and we believe they should not be included.”
“We support the use of AI in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence operations. But using these systems to target large numbers of people at home is inconsistent with democratic values.”
Amodei went on to say that private weapons, such as those used today in Ukraine, are essential for the protection of democracy. “But today, borderline AI systems are not reliable enough to use fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts American military personnel and civilians at risk.”
It is a debate that is likely to continue in the coming days, and it remains to be seen whether Anthropic can withstand an unprecedented attack from its own government and rely on the support of users with its principled stance. In the short term its challenge seems to be to meet the current demand for its programs.
Don’t miss out on the information you need to succeed. Subscribe to the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of must-know tech news.
