Amazon-backed Anthropic launches iPhone app and business tier to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT

Anthropic
on
Wednesday
announced
its
first-ever
enterprise
offering
and
a
free
iPhone
app.

The
generative
artificial
intelligence
startup
is
the
company
behind
Claude,
one
of
the
chatbots
that,
like
OpenAI’s
ChatGPT
and


Google‘s
Gemini,
has
exploded
in
popularity
in
the
past
year.
Anthropic,
founded
by
ex-OpenAI
research
executives,
has
backers
including
Google,


Salesforce
and


Amazon,
and
in
the
past
year,
it’s
closed
five

different
funding
deals
totaling
about
$7.3
billion.

The
new
plan
for
businesses,
dubbed
Team,
has
been
in
development
over
the
last
few
quarters
and
involved
beta-testing
with
between
30
and
50
customers
in
industries
such
as
technology,
financial
services,
legal
services
and
health
care,
Anthropic
co-founder
Daniela
Amodei
told
CNBC
in
an
interview,
adding
that
the
idea
for
the
service
was
partially
borne
out
of
many
of
those
same
customers
asking
for
a
dedicated
enterprise
product.

“So
much
of
what
we
were
hearing
from
enterprise
businesses
is
people
are
kind
of
using
Claude
at
the
office
already,”
Amodei
said.

The
Team
plan
offers
access
to
all
three
of
Anthropic’s
latest
Claude
models,
with
increased
usage
limits,
admin
tools
and
billing
management,
as
well
as
a
longer “context
window,”
meaning
the
ability
for
businesses
to
have “multi-step
conversations”
and
upload
long
documents
like
research
papers
and
legal
contracts
for
processing,
according
to
Anthropic.
Other
features
coming
include “citations
from
reliable
sources
to
verify
AI
generated
claims,”
per
the
release.

The
Team
offering
costs
$30
per
user
per
month
when
billed
monthly.
It
requires
a
minimum
of
five
users.

Anthropic’s
first
iOS
app
is
free
for
users
across
all
plans
and
also
available
starting
Wednesday.
It
provides
syncing
with
web
chats
and
the
ability
to
upload
photos
and
files
from
a
smartphone.

There
are
plans
to
launch
an
Android
app,
too. “We
actually
just
hired
our
first
Android
engineer,
so
we
are
actively
working
on
the
Android
app,”
Amodei
told
CNBC,
adding
that
the
engineer
starts
next
week.

News
of
the
Team
plan
and
iOS
app
comes
more
than
a
month
after

Anthropic’s
debut
of
Claude
3,
a
suite
of
AI
models
that
it
says
are
its
fastest
and
most
powerful
yet.
The
new
tools
are
called
Claude
3
Opus,
Sonnet
and
Haiku.

The
company
has
said
the
most
capable
of
the
new
models,
Claude
3
Opus,
outperformed
OpenAI’s
GPT-4
and
Google’s
Gemini
Ultra
on
industry
benchmark
tests,
such
as
undergraduate-level
knowledge,
graduate-level
reasoning
and
basic
mathematics.
This
is
also
the
first
time
Anthropic
has
offered
multimodal
support:
users
can
upload
photos,
charts,
documents
and
other
types
of
unstructured
data
for
analysis
and
answers.

The
other
models,
Sonnet
and
Haiku,
are
more
compact
and
less
expensive
than
Opus.
The
company
declined
to
specify
how
long
it
took
to
train
Claude
3
or
how
much
it
cost,
but
it
said
companies
like
Airtable
and


Asana
helped
A/B
test
the
models.
In
a
release
Wednesday,
Anthropic
confirmed
that
other
current
clients
using
Claude
include
Pfizer,
Asana,
Zoom,
Perplexity
AI,
Bridgewater
Associates
and
more
currently.

The
generative
AI
field
has
exploded
over
the
past
year,
with
a
record
$29.1
billion
invested
across
nearly
700
deals
in
2023,
a
more
than
260%
increase
in
deal
value
from
a
year
earlier,
according
to
PitchBook.
It’s
become
the
buzziest
phrase
on corporate
earnings
calls quarter
after
quarter.
Academics
and
ethicists
have voiced
significant
concerns about
the
technology’s
tendency
to
propagate
bias,
but
even
so,
it’s
quickly
made
its
way
into schools, online
travel,
the medical
industry, online
advertising and
more.

Around
this
time
last
year,
Anthropic
had
completed
Series
A
and
B
funding
rounds,
but
it
had
only
rolled
out
the
first
version
of
its
chatbot
without
any
consumer
access
or
major
fanfare.
Now,
it’s
one
of
the
hottest
AI
startups,
with
a
product
that
directly
competes
with
ChatGPT
in
both
the
enterprise
and
consumer
worlds.

Claude
3
can
summarize
up
to
about
150,000
words,
or
a
sizeable
book,
about
the
length
range
of “Moby
Dick”
or “Harry
Potter
and
the
Deathly
Hallows.”
Its
previous
version
could
only
summarize
75,000
words.
Users
can
input
large
data
sets,
and
ask
for
summaries
in
the
form
of
a
memo,
letter
or
story.
ChatGPT,
by
contrast,
can
handle
about
3,000
words.

In
January,
OpenAI
came
under
fire
regarding
its
enterprise
offering,
for

quietly
walking
back
a
ban
on
the
military
use
of
ChatGPT
and
its
other
artificial
intelligence
tools.
Its
policies
still
state
that
users
should
not “use
our
service
to
harm
yourself
or
others,”
including
to “develop
or
use
weapons.”
Before
the
change,
OpenAI’s
policy
page
specified
that
the
company
did
not
allow
the
usage
of
its
models
for “activity
that
has
high
risk
of
physical
harm,
including:
weapons
development
[and]
military
and
warfare.”

Anthropic’s
stance
on
the
military
use
of
Claude
is
similar
to
OpenAI’s
updated
policy.

“The
way
that
we
draw
the
line
there
today
is
we
don’t
discriminate
based
on
industry
or
based
on
business,
but
we
have
an
acceptable
use
policy
that
says
what
you
can
and
can’t
use
Claude
for,”
Amodei
told
CNBC,
adding, “Any
business
in
the
world
that’s
not
in
a
sanctioned
country,
of
course,
[and]
meets
basic
business
requirements,
can
use
Claude
for
all
kinds
of
back-office
applications
and
things
like
that,
but
we
have
…
very
strict
guidance
around
Claude
not
being
used
for
weapons,
basically
anything
that
can
cause
violence
or
harm
people.”