Claude

Overview

Claude is Anthropic's flagship AI assistant, designed to help individuals and teams work faster and more effectively. Built on its proprietary model family, Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku, Claude covers writing, editing, coding, data analysis, image interpretation, and web research. Unlike single-purpose tools, Claude functions as a general-purpose AI that integrates directly with tools users already rely on, including Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Chrome, Excel, and PowerPoint. Its Cowork feature lets Claude run multi-step tasks autonomously, handling meeting summaries, standup decks, and document workflows without constant user input. Claude is accessible via web browser, iOS, Android, and desktop applications. For businesses, it offers centralized administration, SSO, enterprise search, and compliance-ready infrastructure including HIPAA support. Anthropic positions Claude around safety and reliability, with model training opt-out across all paid plans. From a free tier with solid core capabilities to team and enterprise plans, Claude scales from individual productivity to company-wide deployment.

Features

• Extended thinking mode -- Shows step-by-step reasoning on complex math, logic, and analysis tasks before delivering answers
• 200K token context window -- Process entire codebases, legal contracts, or long documents in a single conversation
• Claude Code -- Agentic software development mode that reads, writes, and edits code autonomously
• Computer use -- Claude navigates browser interfaces and desktop apps to complete multi-step tasks on your computer
• Constitutional AI -- Safety framework built into training rather than bolted on, giving Claude consistent, principled behavior
• Projects -- Persistent workspaces that maintain context, custom instructions, and documents across conversations
• Cross-platform availability -- Web, desktop app (Mac/Windows), iOS, and Android with seamless sync
• Memory across conversations -- Remembers relevant context from past sessions and updates automatically
• Multi-modal analysis -- Analyze images, PDFs, documents, and data files alongside text
• Web search -- Real-time web access for up-to-date research and fact-checking
• Claude API -- Full programmatic access for developers building on top of Claude in apps and pipelines
• Artifacts -- Create standalone documents, code, and visualizations that update as you refine the conversation
• 1M context window -- Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 support 1M token context at standard pricing
• Deep Research mode -- Multi-step autonomous research that synthesizes findings across sources into structured reports

Best For

Developers and engineers who want an AI pair programmer with agentic coding capabilities, Knowledge workers who regularly process long documents, contracts, and complex research, Businesses and teams looking for a safe, reliable AI that performs well on nuanced analysis, Content creators and writers who need an AI that produces natural, reasoning-grounded prose, Organizations integrating AI into products via API with strong safety and reliability requirements

How It Works

Claude works through a conversational interface where users submit text, images, files, and documents, and Claude responds with analysis, generated content, code, or structured outputs. Anthropic's model family powers responses across three tiers: Haiku for speed, Sonnet for balanced performance, and Opus for the most complex reasoning tasks. Claude integrates with external services through connectors and remote MCP, letting it pull context from Slack, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365 in real time. The Cowork mode extends Claude beyond single-turn chat, enabling autonomous multi-step task completion such as reading transcripts, extracting action items, checking calendars, and building decks without user hand-holding at each step. Skills allow users to configure Claude for repeated workflows. On the developer side, Claude is available via API and deployable through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry for teams that need model access within existing cloud infrastructure.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes Claude different from ChatGPT?

Claude is built by Anthropic with a Constitutional AI framework prioritizing safe, principled behavior. Claude tends to outperform on nuanced reasoning, long-context analysis, and document work. ChatGPT has a larger plugin ecosystem and broader integrations. Many power users maintain both. Claude is often preferred for coding, legal work, and situations where output reliability matters.

What is Claude Code?

Claude Code is an agentic mode where Claude autonomously reads codebases, writes and edits files, runs tests, and completes multi-step engineering tasks. It operates inside your terminal or IDE, not just in chat. Anthropic reports that Claude Code now writes the vast majority of its own internal engineering code, making it one of the most capable AI coding tools available.

How does extended thinking work?

Extended thinking lets Claude reason through a problem step-by-step before giving its final answer. You see the reasoning process as it develops, which improves accuracy on complex tasks like math problems, logical deductions, and multi-step analysis. It is available on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.

What is the difference between the Pro and Max plans?

Pro at $20 per month includes 5x more usage than the Free tier along with Claude Code and extended thinking. Max comes in two tiers: Max 5x ($100 per month) provides 5 times Pro usage, and Max 20x ($200 per month) provides 20 times Pro usage. Both Max tiers also include priority access to new models and features.

Can Claude access the internet?

Yes. Claude has web search capability for real-time information retrieval. Web search is available on the Pro plan and higher, and Claude uses it automatically when a query requires current information beyond its training data cutoff.