Anthropic Launches Updated Version of ChatGPT Competitor, Claude

Anthropic, a startup specializing in artificial intelligence, has unveiled Claude, the latest iteration of its AI chatbot, which aims to be a more secure and reliable option.

Anthropic said Claude 2 is available to anyone in the U.S. or U.K. online at claude.ai, and businesses can access it through an API. The new release on Tuesday comes several months after Anthropic began offering an earlier version of Claude to companies that wanted to add it to their products. The bot was previously tested by a handful of companies, including Quora Inc., which built it into an app called Poe that allows users to ask questions.

Like its predecessor, Claude 2 is built on top of a large language model and can be used for written tasks such as summarizing, searching, answering questions, and coding. Both models can currently take large chunks of text – a user can ask it to summarize a book, for example – although Claude 2 can produce longer answers than its predecessor. Answers can be up to about 3,000 words, according to information provided by the company. Claude 2 also offers more detailed answers for some topics, such as coding and grade-level math, the company said.

Anthropic’s goal has been that Claude is less prone to manipulation than other chatbots. The company aims to control the generation of harmful or offensive results in response to prompts — problems that have plagued competing chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The startup said its tests showed Claude 2 was better than the current model at generating what Anthropic called “harmless responses” to “malicious prompts.”

Anthropic president and founder Daniela Amodei said the newer model is meant to “subjectively feel a little better” than the older version. He added: “And we also know that it’s still not perfect. It still has limitations.”

San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded in 2021 by a handful of former OpenAI employees, including Amodei and his brother Dario Amodei. The startup and its management have called for caution in the rush to develop and release artificial intelligence systems and their potential to change industries.

In May, the company said it had raised $450 million in funding, bringing the company’s total raised to date to over $1 billion.

Anthropic said it plans to make Claude available to people in more countries in the coming months.