What is Claude AI?
Claude is a family of large language models (LLMs) developed by Anthropic.
It is named after American computer scientist Claude Shannon who is known as the ‘father of information theory’ and a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) research.
The family consists of three AI models:
- Haiku, optimised for speed
- Opus, designed for complex reasoning tasks
- Sonnet, balancing capability and performance
The three siblings are all generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), which means they were designed to predict the next word in large amounts of text and then fine-tuned using human feedback.
Who owns Claude AI?
Claude is owned by Anthropic, which is a public benefit corporation based in San Francisco, California.
It was founded in 2021 by seven former employees of OpenAI, including siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei.
The other co-founders were Jared Kaplan, Jack Clark and Ben Mann.
The organisation describes its purpose as “the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity”.
Who funds Claude AI?
In September 2023, Amazon announced an investment of up to $4 billion in Anthropic.
Google followed suit with a $2 billion commitment a month later.
After the most recent funding round in September 2025, Anthropic’s valuation hit $183 billion, making it fourth private company by value globally.
What is Claude AI good for?
Each AI model of the Claude family was designed for different purpose.
While Haiku provides by far the fastest responses, Opus has demonstrated enhanced capabilities in areas like maths and coding.
According to Anthropic, its most advanced AI model of the series outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 as well as Google’s Gemini Ultra.
Similarly to the other chatbots mentioned above, Claude can also generate various types of content, analyse or summarise text and brainstorm ideas.
It also serves as a good programming companion, supporting a wide range of coding languages.
You can upload documents, spreadsheets and PDFs to the chat window, and ask Claude to analyse the data, identify patterns and provide insights.
The AI model can also generate charts and diagrams from your data, making complex information easier to understand.
What makes Claude stand out is its long context window, which allows it to handle a very large amount of text at once.
It remembers previously mentioned information, even from an uploaded document, and can use it later on.
Can Claude AI search the internet?
In March 2025, Anthropic launched a web search feature for all Claude plans, allowing users to get more up-to-date responses, including current news.
When the AI model incorporates information from the internet into its answers, it provides direct citations, so you can easily fact-check sources.
Can Claude AI speak?
The Voice mode on Claude allows you to have a spoken conversation with the AI model on your iPhone or Android device.
As the chatbot speaks, it also displays key points on-screen in real time.
Users can easily switch between text and voice within the same conversation, with the previous context maintained.
For the best results, Anthropic advises users to speak naturally at a normal pace, but if you have a complex query, consider breaking it into separate questions.
Can Claude AI generate images?
All three models of the Claude family can process both text and images. However, the AI is limited to text-based output only.
While you can upload pictures for the model to work with, Claude currently cannot produce images on its own.
Is Claude AI free?
You can use Claude for free as part of its basic plan, which includes:
- Chat on web, iOS and Android
- Text, code and charts generation
- Web search
More advanced users may appreciate Claude Pro plan for $20 a month, or $17 if billed annually, which adds some extra features:
- Claude Code: Access the AI model directly in your terminal.
- Research: The AI model conducts multiple searches, determines what to investigate next based on the information already found and explores different angles of a question systematically.
- Connect Claude to Google Workspace
- Switch between more Claude models
To access the full package and new advanced features early, you will need to pay $100 monthly for Claude Max.
Is Claude AI better than ChatGPT?
Claude was developed with a strong emphasis on safety and ethics, using ‘Constitutional AI’.
The development process involved both a supervised learning and a reinforcement learning phase where AI trains another AI, without any human bias.
As a result, the AI model can sometimes be a bit too cautious and even refuse some requests due to its strict safety protocols.
ChatGPT, on the other hand, aims to be a general-purpose AI for everyone and an all-in-one toolkit, integrating voice, image generation and data analysis.
It is less focused on safety, which has previously led to some unfortunate consequences.
Writers and researchers who want deep, nuanced responses may appreciate Claude AI for its massive context window and deep reasoning.
Everyday users and creatives, though, may choose ChatGPT for its great brainstorming ideas and specialised tools.