Anthropic Launches Claude, a Rival to ChatGPT

Anthropic is a startup co-founded by former OpenAI employees. Anthropic's AI, Claude, a chatbot, can be instructed to perform a range of tasks, including searching through documents, summarizing, writing and coding, and answering questions about specific topics. In these ways, it is said to be similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. However, Anthropic claims that Claude is "much less likely to produce harmful output", "easier to talk to" and "more directable".

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Anthropic Aims to Better Serve Its Customers

Following a closed beta late last year, Anthropic has been quietly testing Claude with launch partners including Robin AI, AssemblyAI, Notion, Quora and DuckDuckGo. Together with ChatGPT, Claude powers DuckDuckGo's recently launched DuckAssist tool, which directly answers simple search queries for users. Quora is offering access to Claude through its experimental AI chat app Poe.

"Constitutional AI" aims to offer a "principle-based" approach to aligning AI systems with human intentions. And it allows AI similar to ChatGPT to respond to questions using a simple set of principles as guidelines. Anthropic started with a list of around 10 principles that, taken together, form a kind of "constitution" (hence the name "constitutional AI") to build Claude. The principles have not been made public. But Anthropic says they are based on the concepts of beneficence (maximizing positive impact), do no harm (avoiding giving harmful advice) and autonomy (respecting freedom of choice).

Anthropic Admits Claude Has Limitations

Anthropic also acknowledges that Claude has limitations. Many of these were revealed during the closed beta. Claude is reportedly worse at math and is a weaker programmer than ChatGPT. As with ChatGPT, it is also possible to bypass Claude's built-in security features through smart routing.

Anthropic is feeling pressure from investors to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars invested in artificial intelligence technology. The company has significant outside backing, including a $580 million tranche from a group of investors including disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, Jim McClave, Nishad Singh, Jaan Tallinn and the Center for Emerging Risk Research.

Most recently, Google committed $300 million to Anthropic for an initial 10 percent stake. Under the terms of the deal, first reported by the Financial Times, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its "preferred cloud provider" with companies "co-developing AI computing systems".