Anthropic. A name that only a handful of people knew two years ago. Today, it is one of the most closely watched AI companies in the world. The company was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers and executives—people who were directly involved in the creation of ChatGPT. However, they decided to follow their own path, with an emphasis on AI safety and ethics.
The result of their work is Claude, a conversational AI assistant that can write, analyze documents, program, solve complex problems, and handle multi-step workflows. The name Claude is no coincidence. It refers to the mathematician Claude Shannon, considered the "father of the information age."
How does the Claude model work?
Claude is based on large language models (LLMs), the same technology that powers ChatGPT and Gemini. It understands language thanks to an architecture called a transformer, which helps it grasp relationships between words and ideas.
What sets it apart from the others is its approach to training. Anthropic developed a method called Constitutional AI. It is a set of written principles that guide the model to be helpful, honest, and safe. While ChatGPT learns primarily from feedback provided by human reviewers (RLHF), Claude follows firmly established ethical rules. In practice, this means fewer harmful or misleading answers.
Another major strength? A large context window. Claude can process enormous amounts of text at once—entire books, extensive codebases, or long conversations—without "forgetting" what was discussed at the beginning.
Claude models: Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus
Anthropic named its models after literary forms. Two main models are currently available:
- Claude 4.6 Sonnet – the flagship hybrid model with reasoning support
- Claude 4.5 Haiku – a lightweight and fast model suitable for simple tasks
- Claude 4.6 Opus – the largest model, but paradoxically currently the least powerful of the three
The most interesting one is Claude 4.6 Sonnet. It is Anthropic's first model capable of "thinking" before responding. Users can enable reasoning mode, in which the model spends anywhere from several seconds to several minutes breaking the question down into smaller parts and verifying its answers. The results are then more accurate and better structured.
Another new addition is Claude Opus 4.6, with a context window of 1 million tokens. In practice, this means it can read an entire book in a single session, process a complete codebase without losing context, and handle very long conversations without interruption. Its weaknesses remain high API costs and less efficient image and video processing compared to Gemini.
All models have a standard context window of 200,000 tokens (approximately 150,000 words, equivalent to a 600-page novel) and can handle multi-step instructions, tool use, and structured JSON output.
Plans and pricing: What do you get for free and what do you have to pay for?
Claude is available for free with certain limitations and requires users to be signed in. Paid plans unlock significantly more capabilities:
- Claude Pro for $20 per month: 5x higher limits, priority access, previews of new features
- Claude Team for $30 per user per month: team management, integration with CRM systems such as Salesforce, citations for verifying answers
- Claude Enterprise: custom data, a context window of 500,000 tokens, integration with the GitHub platform
For developers, Claude is available through the API, Amazon Bedrock, or Google Cloud Vertex AI. API pricing: Haiku costs 80 cents per million input tokens, Sonnet costs $3, and Opus costs $15 per million input tokens.
Skills, Cowork, and Plugins
Claude is no longer just a chatbot. With the launch of the Cowork feature, it has become a tool that reads files, organizes folders, creates documents, and runs multi-step workflows that previously required an entire team. After Cowork launched, investors even coined a new term: "SaaSpocalypse," because in one stroke it wiped out the value of many SaaS tools.
Skills are at the heart of the entire system. They function as persistent instructions for Claude. While a regular prompt disappears after the conversation ends, a Skill remains saved in the account and is activated whenever a relevant task comes up. You only need to create it once, and Claude will follow it every time.
How do you create a Skill? No programming is required. Open a new chat, describe the task you want to automate, attach examples of good outputs, and Claude will automatically generate the Skill file. The more specific the examples you provide, the more accurate the results will be.
Cowork then adds access to local files and the desktop. Instead of manually going through invoices, simply show Claude the folder and it will extract invoice numbers, client names, due dates, compile a spreadsheet, and flag overdue payments. One instruction replaces 30 minutes of manual work.
Anthropic has also launched 11 plugins that connect Claude to tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Canva, Figma, Zendesk, Notion, Jira, and Snowflake. Each plugin is open source, so it can be modified or used as the basis for building your own.
Claude vs. ChatGPT: Who wins?
The honest answer? It depends on what you need. Claude excels at document analysis, long texts, structured reasoning, working with extensive codebases, and writing code. ChatGPT, on the other hand, leads in creative writing, web browsing, and access to its own ecosystem of extensions (custom GPTs).
If you spend hours reading contracts, research reports, or debugging complex code, Claude is probably the better choice. If you want to quickly generate an image or consult a voice assistant, ChatGPT has the edge.
What to watch out for: Limitations and risks
Claude is not infallible. Like other AI models, it sometimes hallucinates, meaning it invents facts that sound convincing but are not true. Always verify critical information using primary sources. Free users do not have access to web browsing, so Claude works with data up to early 2025. Paid users can enable web search manually in the settings. Claude also cannot generate images, and API costs can quickly add up with intensive use.
Anthropic offers certain legal guarantees to customers in the event of copyright disputes, but the ethical issue of training models on data without the authors' explicit consent remains unresolved, just as it does with other AI companies.
