What is Claude by Anthropic?
Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, an AI safety company. It handles text conversations, document analysis, coding, and complex reasoning. Anthropic built Claude using Constitutional AI to make it more honest and less likely to cause harm. You access it at claude.ai or via the API.
Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic, designed for safe and honest conversations, document analysis, coding, and complex reasoning tasks.
What Anthropic Does
Anthropic is an AI safety company founded in 2021. Its core focus is building AI systems that behave reliably and honestly, even as they become more capable. The founders previously worked at OpenAI and left to pursue a more safety-focused research direction. Anthropic publishes research on AI alignment, interpretability, and the risks that come with large language models. Claude is the company’s main product and the primary way it puts that research into practice.
What Makes Claude Different
Claude is trained using a method Anthropic calls Constitutional AI. Rather than adjusting behaviour purely through human feedback, the model is trained against a set of written principles covering honesty, helpfulness, and harm avoidance. In practice this means Claude tends to acknowledge uncertainty instead of fabricating answers, and it declines requests more consistently when they cross clear lines. It also handles long documents well: the context window (the amount of text it can process at once) is among the largest available, which makes it practical for reading lengthy reports or contracts.
Claude Model Tiers: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus
Anthropic organises Claude into three tiers. Haiku is optimised for speed and cost, suitable for straightforward tasks or applications that need to process many requests quickly. Sonnet sits in the middle: capable enough for most professional work, fast enough for regular use. Opus is the most powerful tier, designed for complex reasoning, nuanced writing, and tasks where quality matters more than speed. You can access all three at claude.ai or through the Claude API.
What You Can Use Claude For
Claude handles a wide range of text-based tasks. Common uses include summarising long documents, drafting emails and reports, explaining technical concepts, writing and reviewing code, and analysing data from uploaded files. It can also act as a thinking partner for brainstorming or working through a decision. If you want to build Claude into your own product or workflow, the Claude API gives you programmatic access to all model tiers.
Claude vs Other AI Assistants
The main alternative is ChatGPT from OpenAI. Both are large language models capable of similar tasks, but they differ in emphasis. Claude tends to be more cautious about making things up and is stronger on long-document tasks. ChatGPT has a larger user base, more third-party integrations, and a well-developed plugin ecosystem. For a detailed side-by-side, see Claude vs ChatGPT for business.
Our tip: Start with the free tier at claude.ai before committing to a paid plan. Upload a real work document (a report, contract, or dataset) and ask it specific questions. That gives you a much better sense of Claude’s actual value than trying generic prompts.
Frequently asked questions
Who made Claude?
Claude is made by Anthropic, an AI safety company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. Anthropic focuses specifically on building AI systems that are safe, honest, and beneficial. The company has raised significant funding and is considered one of the leading AI research labs alongside OpenAI and Google DeepMind.
What is Constitutional AI?
Constitutional AI is Anthropic's technique for training Claude to follow a set of written principles about being helpful, harmless, and honest. Instead of relying purely on human feedback to correct bad outputs, the model is trained to evaluate and improve its own responses against those principles. The result is an assistant that declines harmful requests more consistently and acknowledges uncertainty more openly than many competing models.
What are the different Claude models?
Anthropic offers Claude in three tiers. Haiku is the fastest and most affordable option, suited for simple tasks and high-volume applications. Sonnet balances speed and capability and works well for most professional tasks. Opus is the most capable model, suited for complex analysis, nuanced writing, and tasks requiring deep reasoning. All three are available through claude.ai and the Claude API.
Is Claude free to use?
Claude has a free tier at claude.ai that gives you access to recent Sonnet models with usage limits. A paid subscription (Claude Pro) removes those limits and adds priority access. For API access, you pay per token, with pricing varying by model tier. There is no permanently free API tier, but Anthropic provides trial credits when you first create an API account.