OpenAI competitor Anthropic announces its most powerful AI yet

OpenAI competitor Anthropic on Thursday announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its most powerful artificial intelligence model yet.

Claude is one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, has exploded in popularity in the past year. Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including Google, Salesforce and Amazon. In the past year, it's closed five different funding deals totaling about $7.3 billion.

The news follows Anthropic's debut of its Claude 3 family of models in March and OpenAI's GPT-4o in May. The company said Claude 3.5 Sonnet is faster than its previous leading model, Claude 3 Opus, and is the first model from Anthropic's new Claude 3.5 family.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is free from the company's website, Claude.ai, and in the Claude iPhone app. Claude Pro and Team subscribers can access the latest model with higher rate limits.

"It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone," the company said in a blog post. It can also write, edit and execute code.

Anthropic also announced "Artifacts," which it said allows a user to ask its Claude chatbot to, for example, generate a text document or code and then opens the result in a dedicated window. "This creates a dynamic workspace where they can see, edit, and build upon Claude's creations in real-time," the company said, adding that it expects Artifacts will be useful for code development, legal contract drafting and analysis, business report writing and more.

As startups like Anthropic and OpenAI gain steam in the generative AI business, they — alongside tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta — have been