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AI in ASIA
Tuesday, 3 March 2026

3Before9

3 must-know AI stories before your 9am coffee

Who should pay attention

Enterprise AI buyers | Developers | CIOs | CTOs

What changes next

Companies will increasingly prioritise AI service resilience and multi-vendor strategies.

1

Claude Goes Down Worldwide as "Unprecedented Demand" Strains Anthropic's Infrastructure

Yesterday evening Singapore time, Claude experienced a significant global outage, with nearly 10,000 error reports logged across Downdetector in waves throughout the day. The disruption hit claude.ai, the mobile apps, Claude Code, the Anthropic console, and even Claude for Government, affecting developers and consumers simultaneously. Anthropic cited "unprecedented demand over the past week" as a contributing factor and confirmed the core enterprise API was broadly unaffected, though certain API methods were also misbehaving. By late evening SGT the company confirmed services were restored: "Claude is back up and running. We're grateful to our users while the team works to match the demand."

Why it matters for Asia

The timing is pointed. Claude hit the number one spot on the Apple App Store last week, almost certainly driven by the wave of users switching in solidarity following the Pentagon blacklist drama. That user surge stress-tested infrastructure at the worst possible moment. For enterprise AI buyers across Asia evaluating Claude as a production dependency, it's a reminder that supply-side reliability risk is real, not just a governance question. Any team building Claude-integrated workflows should be pressure-testing failover strategies and multi-provider fallbacks now.^

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2

Apple Fires the Starting Gun on AI Device Strategy With iPhone 17e

Yesterday Apple opened its multi-day product blitz with the official launch of the iPhone 17e, its second consecutive annual budget iPhone, confirming this is now a permanent product line rather than a one-off. Priced at $599 with 256GB base storage (double its predecessor at the same price), it packs Apple's A19 chip, MagSafe support, the faster C1X modem, and a 48MP camera. An updated iPad Air M4 also dropped simultaneously. Pre-orders open Wednesday, shipping March 11 across 70+ countries. More hardware is expected today and Wednesday.

Why it matters for Asia

The iPhone 17e is Apple's mass-market AI delivery vehicle. For the first time ever, every device in Apple's lineup now supports Apple Intelligence. That's a significant inflection point for Southeast Asia, where the budget tier drives volume. Samsung has already led with the AI-first Galaxy S26 series and Apple is closing the gap in the mid-market. Telcos and app developers in the region should be planning for a 2026 cohort of users with on-device AI capabilities across the full price spectrum.^

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3

Jack Dorsey Cuts Block's Workforce in Half and Tells the World Every CEO Should Do the Same

On Thursday, Block's Jack Dorsey announced the fintech company behind Square and Cash App would cut 4,000 of its 10,000 staff, roughly 40%, citing AI tools that have "changed what it means to build and run a company." Unusually, Dorsey didn't dress it up as restructuring: he said something shifted in December when AI models became "an order of magnitude more capable," and predicted most companies would reach the same conclusion within a year. Block's stock surged 24% on the news. The story dominated the weekend news cycle and has crystallised into a genuine macro debate about whether AI jobs displacement has arrived or is being overstated.

Why it matters for Asia

Block's Afterpay business has deep roots in Australian and Southeast Asian markets, and the cuts will touch teams supporting those operations. More broadly, Dorsey's public prediction that "most companies are late" to this realisation is the kind of CEO signal that boards across the region are pressure-testing right now. For commercial AI businesses, it's both a threat narrative to manage with clients and a competitive framing opportunity, as AI-enabled lean teams delivering more is exactly the pitch.^

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