AI + ML

Chatbot has no respect for timing of its maker's financial announcement

Claude has gone offline on the day after its maker Anthropic filed for what is expected to be a blockbuster IPO.The popular chatbot and coding tool suffered an outage from around 0600 UTC on Tuesday, with Anthropic saying the team was investigating the issue.By 1042 UTC, the status page said a fix had been implemented and the technical team was monitoring the results. Some users continued to complain to The Register about the disruption after that point.

Downdetector shows users reporting the LLM service from Anthropic was down twice momentarily yesterday. A surge in reports started from 0700 UTC today and peaked at 0948 UTC, after which they started to fall.

The timing of the technical difficulties is unfortunate for Anthropic, the company founded in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI.Yesterday, the company submitted a draft registration statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering (IPO) for common stock.It has yet to set the price of shares but a May funding round which raised $65 billion valued the company at around $965 billion (£717 billion), more than rival OpenAI, makers of chatbot ChatGPT.It is set to be a monster year for IPOs, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and OpenAI also anticipated to join the frenzy. Each is expected to be valued at around $1 trillion.Claude Code has bolstered Anthropic’s reputation and has been well-received by some developers. Reportedly, Anthropic earns more in revenue despite having a fraction of the users OpenAI claims to serve.According to the Wall Street Journal, Anthropic is on the verge of reporting its first quarter of operating profit, according to people at the company who spoke anonymously. ®