I'm not sure this is even conceivable, but... Imagine the bootstrap problem of intelligence systems going down, when no one knows how to bring them back up without the system itself walking them through it... Like if power and intelligence were to go down in a Carrington-class event in 10 years...
Like what would happen to individuals ten years from now who are trying to live if AI suddenly became inaccessible
Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?
To not just lack the objects of intelligence, but the very process of it...
The general drove on. "At the present time our chief bottleneck is the fact that missiles are limited in intelligence. The computer controlling them can only be so large, and for that reason they can meet the changing nature of anti-missile defenses in an unsatisfactory way. Few missiles, if any, accomplish their goal, and missile warfare is coming to a dead end, for the enemy, fortunately, as well as for ourselves.
"On the other hand, a missile with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned . . ."
We don’t even need to imagine that world, Russia is doing it today.
Missiles and ammo are too expensive, so they send people to run at the enemy, revealing their firing positions. Then they drone the people who revealed themselves.
If I was an AI, I would reason that a T-800 is far more valuable than a man soldier who I must feed and clothe and heat. Use the disposable soldiers first and save the robots for later.
I'm not sure what this quote is from, but I almost down voted you in disgust before realizing that was exactly the intended effect. In other words, "Thanks, i hate it"
My fear was that people like Linus would die and then nobody would be able to build operating systems anymore, because zoomers and below can’t even use computers.
Now we know they won’t even be able to read and write. But maybe Claude sonnet 12817 can maintain the operating system. It’ll be 17,000 dependencies in and mostly written in JavaScript, but it’ll work.
Hardly a unique problem to AI systems. You certainly can't bootstrap pretty much any industry to its current state without the existing items of its current state. Any sort of chip fab is a great example. Or most manufacturing.
Sounds like a bad novel. In the year 2050 no one knows how to actually program anymore. Then ClaudeGPT by GoogleSoft goes down. A 74 year old former software developer is on his farm tending to hens.
A self driving car crashes into his barn.
Out comes out a tech bro, “Yo OG programmer bro, it’s all busted bro, could you like make it unbusted bro.”
Then again with social security set to go bankrupt it’s not like we’ll be able to retire
I think the reason that intelligence is so scary is how contextual, stateful, path-dependent, and coupled it is.
Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.
The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.
A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.
yeah this was the devops promise too. Enterprise evolved into dedicated teams to manage AWS and other infra, instead of reducing headcount it raised it. so it goes.
> Enterprise evolved into dedicated teams to manage AWS and other infra, instead of reducing headcount it raised it. so it goes.
I wager that's mostly due to the Jevons paradox, though; it's so much cheaper and easier to build out systems with cloud than on-prem that you end up building way more systems than you would have without it, resulting in an overall headcount increase.
It's a real problem but your framing of it is itself very alarming.
Most humans aren't useless by any measure of most or usefulness. Our culture is our tools, dying due to a lack of antibiotics doesn't mean you didn't have anything to contribute, it means you didn't have access to the tool you needed. This is the problem we need to guard against.
No one is going to lose the ability to reason! This is accepting the most extreme version of the marketing presented by frontier labs, don't do it. People may lose fluency or familiarity or access to training on specific skills. We should put some care into making sure that can't be a catastrophe, for sure.
You've obviously never stood in a room of college freshmen and tried to deal with a young man having repeated issues being able to type his _own_ name into a box on a screen.
This is basically the premise of Bacigalupi's "Pump Six", from "Pump Six and Other Stories".
The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.
Imagine having a bunch of Claude agents doing time sensitive work and this happens and now a single human needs to pick up several 8k PRs authored by bots that can't talk to you now. Not sure how effective it would be to switch models using OpenRouter and the like given that, as the Earendil guys said, there is a lot of session detail that the provider doesn't share. The uptime is really going to cap their market penetration imo.
Never thought of it, but knowing that they encrypt reasoning is it possible that they share the decryption keys with other cloud providers like GCP Vertex / AWS Bedrock?
Neither electricity, nor the Internet is provided by one or two organizations globally, both with a blast radius that quite often takes out all of their services.
Not sure how long the latter will remain true – centralization is well underway there; try not to think of Cloudflare too much...
When I worked at one of the early paging and cellular companies, every company had phones and pagers on at least one or two competitors for the oncall folks - you can't get a call to fix your cellular network when you are down.
Likewise while at Google, they didn't let us put Google Voice numbers down as our oncall phone number. Some folks even had multiple phones on different networks as backups.
I'm sure they have either other SOTA models or open source models around to help if things to completely pear shaped.
You can get away with a lack of rigor in software engineering (from both humans and AI agaents) because it's often cheap to try it and see. Once you get to operating the platform, it changes, and operational decisions need to be made carefully and code needs to be deployed carefully.
Given the amount of usage I'm now getting from Opus 5.5, I'm surprised it took this long since release for their first outage. In my experience, it's about 10x the usage of Fable 5.1 with similar, perhaps greater levels of intelligence.
Yesterday got email from Claude that they are offering 50% off for one month if I renew my subscription. I bought it today and now this. I wonder if they sent that email to too many people.
Rumours have it that the migratory flutterings of end users from Anthropic to OpenAI (sometimes taking a wrong turn and entering Grok purgatory), then back to Anthropic a season (2 weeks) later, so on, moves the great Cords of The Sky that crank the sun and moon into place, which turns the great wheel of the seasons.
If you listen closely, you may hear them squawking in annoyance after each announcement.
I've seen many people with 500s for over an hour, meanwhile the status page was green with no issues whatsoever.
Have they tried using a fraction of their immense budget to run E2E tests?
At this point downdetector is more reliable than any of these "status" pages. And it does show reports starting 9:30ish AM EST.
I've been getting 503s from the API. When I first checked everything was green, then it said "Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork" and I see now they've included the API in the failure as well
Anthropic yesterday: We have perfect AI agents to do everything now, value us at $100 Trillion
Anthropic today: We don't really have AI agents, they are glorified versions of automation scripts and one has broken today. But tomorrow we will have perfect AI agents, so still value us at $100 Trillion.
A more cynical version of me could imagine scheduling an outage to make people think about how dependent they are on your product in advance of the IPO
Project completely disappeared. Conveniently for Anthropic, the bug report also went down, so they weren't spammed by my stale complaints after the project magically resurfaced.
Maybe an increase in sign ups due to people learning of their existence from the IPO? It's the authentication that seems to be failing, not the actual inference.
Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and the Claude API
Subscribe
Update - We are investigating reports of degraded performance affecting claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC
Update - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Some requests to the Claude API are also returning errors. We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC
Investigating - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Users may see failed requests, errors loading or sending conversations, or be asked to sign in again; retrying may succeed. We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Sep 29, 2026 - 14:21 UTC
"Update
We are investigating reports of degraded performance ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 1 minute ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC
Update
We are investigating elevated error rates ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 2 minutes ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC
Investigating
We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai ... We will provide an update as soon as possible."
just a hunch, but i think they might just provide an update as soon as possible.
Berget's "Cached input tokens are billed at the same rate as regular input tokens" pricing model is kind of painful for lots of coding use-cases, especially when competitors are offering significant discounts for cached input tokens.
Like what would happen to individuals ten years from now who are trying to live if AI suddenly became inaccessible
Of course we all know most humans are useless and unable to survive outside our culture, but the difference is that I'm trying to picture is the individual trying the reason through challenges. The version of this that has been obvious to me up to now is that the individual didn't have the knowledge to look after themselves. But I guess it feels different to conceive of them not having the ability to fully reason on their own...?
To not just lack the objects of intelligence, but the very process of it...
"On the other hand, a missile with a man or two within, controlling flight by graphitics, would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent. It would give us a lead that might well mean the margin of victory. Besides which, gentlemen, the exigencies of war compel us to remember one thing. A man is much more dispensable than a computer. Manned missiles could be launched in numbers and under circumstances that no good general would care to undertake as far as computer-directed missiles are concerned . . ."
Missiles and ammo are too expensive, so they send people to run at the enemy, revealing their firing positions. Then they drone the people who revealed themselves.
If I was an AI, I would reason that a T-800 is far more valuable than a man soldier who I must feed and clothe and heat. Use the disposable soldiers first and save the robots for later.
Now we know they won’t even be able to read and write. But maybe Claude sonnet 12817 can maintain the operating system. It’ll be 17,000 dependencies in and mostly written in JavaScript, but it’ll work.
A self driving car crashes into his barn.
Out comes out a tech bro, “Yo OG programmer bro, it’s all busted bro, could you like make it unbusted bro.”
Then again with social security set to go bankrupt it’s not like we’ll be able to retire
Which doesn't seem like it. The ideal is to keep removing couplings. But in practice, I find that focusing on the statefulness, the distribution-specificness, these "accidentals", is how you actually get leverage.
The obvious social consequence is now the tendency towards centralization, tyranny, "you people can't think for yourselves, not because you have some kind of 'inherent intelligence defect', but because the world is so complicated and interconnected that only coherent systems thinking (conveniently administered from one central point) is what can save you". In the Enlightenment world, the ideal was that every man could in principle, think for themselves.
A good ending might be that everybody benefits each other by distributing intelligence, but in practice centralization always seems to win.
I dare companies to gamble on running their businesses on absolute skeleton crews long term
I wager that's mostly due to the Jevons paradox, though; it's so much cheaper and easier to build out systems with cloud than on-prem that you end up building way more systems than you would have without it, resulting in an overall headcount increase.
Most humans aren't useless by any measure of most or usefulness. Our culture is our tools, dying due to a lack of antibiotics doesn't mean you didn't have anything to contribute, it means you didn't have access to the tool you needed. This is the problem we need to guard against.
No one is going to lose the ability to reason! This is accepting the most extreme version of the marketing presented by frontier labs, don't do it. People may lose fluency or familiarity or access to training on specific skills. We should put some care into making sure that can't be a catastrophe, for sure.
The titular Pump Six breaks down and basically there's nobody left in the world who knows how to even reason about the steps needed to fix it. There's just some log dump and nobody understands what it means. Humans are no longer capable of complex reasoning, they just live in the moment and hump.
PRs shouldn't really be reaching 8k diffs no matter who authors them.
There's an ocean between what "should" happen and what actually happens in tech today.
Opus isn’t even allowed to decrypt thinking blocks from Fable if you switch models mid-conversation.
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/preser...
(but yes if AI is going to propagate, they need to fix their uptimes)
Not sure how long the latter will remain true – centralization is well underway there; try not to think of Cloudflare too much...
Isn't that a good news!
Likewise while at Google, they didn't let us put Google Voice numbers down as our oncall phone number. Some folks even had multiple phones on different networks as backups.
I'm sure they have either other SOTA models or open source models around to help if things to completely pear shaped.
It's everyones.
Everyone must code alone
Had to shift+tab into other modes and manually approve permissions like a cave man
If you listen closely, you may hear them squawking in annoyance after each announcement.
The Samsara of AI subscriptions.
At this point downdetector is more reliable than any of these "status" pages. And it does show reports starting 9:30ish AM EST.
Anthropic today: We don't really have AI agents, they are glorified versions of automation scripts and one has broken today. But tomorrow we will have perfect AI agents, so still value us at $100 Trillion.
Would be interesting to see how OpenAI and Anthropic would respond to being "accidentally" hacked by their respective Frankenstein monsters.
Previous: GitHub outage
https://status.claude.com/ says:
Elevated errors on claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork and the Claude API Subscribe Update - We are investigating reports of degraded performance affecting claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC Update - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Some requests to the Claude API are also returning errors. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC Investigating - We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai (including the desktop and mobile apps), Claude Code and Claude Cowork. Users may see failed requests, errors loading or sending conversations, or be asked to sign in again; retrying may succeed. We will provide an update as soon as possible. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:21 UTC
Posted 1 minute ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:30 UTC Update We are investigating elevated error rates ... We will provide an update as soon as possible.
Posted 2 minutes ago. Sep 29, 2026 - 14:28 UTC Investigating We are investigating elevated error rates affecting Claude.ai ... We will provide an update as soon as possible."
just a hunch, but i think they might just provide an update as soon as possible.