Anthropic on Wednesday announced its first-ever enterprise offering and a free iPhone app.
The generative artificial intelligence startup is the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini, has exploded in popularity in the past year. Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including Google, Salesforce and Amazon, and in the past year, it’s closed five different funding deals totaling about $7.3 billion.
The new plan for businesses, dubbed Team, has been in development over the last few quarters and involved beta-testing with between 30 and 50 customers in industries such as technology, financial services, legal services and health care, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told CNBC in an interview, adding that the idea for the service was partially borne out of many of those same customers asking for a dedicated enterprise product.
“So much of what we were hearing from enterprise businesses is people are kind of using Claude at the office already,” Amodei said.
The Team plan offers access to all three of Anthropic’s latest Claude models, with increased usage limits, admin tools and billing management, as well as a longer “context window,” meaning the ability for businesses to have “multi-step conversations” and upload long documents like research papers and legal contracts for processing, according to Anthropic. Other features coming include “citations from reliable sources to verify AI generated claims,” per the release.
The Team offering costs $30 per user per month when billed monthly. It requires a minimum of five users.
Anthropic iPhone app
Anthropic’s first iOS app is free for users across all plans and also available starting Wednesday. It provides syncing with web chats and the ability to upload photos and files from a smartphone.
There are plans to launch an Android app, too. “We actually just hired our first Android engineer, so we are actively working on the Android app,” Amodei told CNBC, adding that the engineer starts next week.
News of the Team plan and iOS app comes more than a month after Anthropic’s debut of Claude 3, a suite of AI models that it says are its fastest and most powerful yet. The new tools are called Claude 3 Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.
The company has said the most capable of the new models, Claude 3 Opus, outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate-level knowledge, graduate level reasoning and basic mathematics. This is also the first time Anthropic has offered multimodal support: Users can upload photos, charts, documents and other types of unstructured data for analysis and answers.
The other models, Sonnet and Haiku, are more compact and less expensive than Opus. The company declined to specify how long it took to train Claude 3 or how much it cost, but it said companies like Airtable and Asana helped A/B test the models. In a release on Wednesday, Anthropic confirmed that other current clients using Claude include Pfizer, Asana, Zoom, Perplexity AI, Bridgewater Associates and more currently.
The generative AI field has exploded over the past year, with a record $29.1 billion invested across nearly 700 deals in 2023, a more than 260% increase in deal value from a year earlier, according to PitchBook. It’s become the buzziest phrase on corporate earnings calls quarter after quarter. Academics and ethicists have voiced significant concerns about the technology’s tendency to propagate bias, but even so, it’s quickly made its way into schools, online travel, the medical industry, online advertising and more.
Around this time last year, Anthropic had completed Series A and B funding rounds, but it had only rolled out the first version of its chatbot without any consumer access or major fanfare. Now, it’s one of the hottest AI startups, with a product that directly competes with ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds.
Claude 3 can summarize up to about 150,00 words, or a sizeable book, about the length range of “Moby Dick” or “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” Its previous version could only summarize 75,000 words. Users can input large data sets, and ask for summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. ChatGPT, by contrast, can handle about 3,000 words.
In January, OpenAI came under fire regarding its enterprise offering, for quietly walking back a ban on the military use of ChatGPT and its other artificial intelligence tools. Its policies still state that users should not “use our service to harm yourself or others,” including to “develop or use weapons.” Before the change, OpenAI’s policy page specified that the company did not allow the usage of its models for “activity that has high risk of physical harm, including: weapons development [and] military and warfare.”
Anthropic’s stance on the military use of Claude is similar to OpenAI’s updated policy.
“The way that we draw the line there today is we don’t discriminate based on industry or based on business, but we have an acceptable use policy that says what you can and can’t use Claude for,” Amodei told CNBC, adding, “Any business in the world that’s not in a sanctioned country, of course, [and] meets basic business requirements, can use Claude for all kinds of back-office applications and things like that, but we have… very strict guidance around Claude not being used for weapons, basically anything that can cause violence or harm people.”
Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner said Thursday that he’s moving out of the “bomb shelter” with Nvidia and into a position of safety, expecting that the chipmaker is positioned to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.
“The growth and the demand for GPUs is off the charts,” he told CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” referring to Nvidia’s graphics processing units that are powering the artificial intelligence boom. He said investors just need to listen to commentary from OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk.
President Trump announced an expansive and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday. The plan established a 10% baseline tariff, though many countries like China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to steeper rates. The announcement sent stocks tumbling on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 5%, headed for its worst day since 2022.
The big reason Nvidia may be better positioned to withstand Trump’s tariff hikes is because semiconductors are on the list of exceptions, which Gerstner called a “wise exception” due to the importance of AI.
Nvidia’s business has exploded since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and annual revenue has more than doubled in each of the past two fiscal years. After a massive rally, Nvidia’s stock price has dropped by more than 20% this year and was down almost 7% on Thursday.
Gerstner is concerned about the potential of a recession due to the tariffs, but is relatively bullish on Nvidia, and said the “negative impact from tariffs will be much less than in other areas.”
He said it’s key for the U.S. to stay competitive in AI. And while the company’s chips are designed domestically, they’re manufactured in Taiwan “because they can’t be fabricated in the U.S.” Higher tariffs would punish companies like Meta and Microsoft, he said.
“We’re in a global race in AI,” Gerstner said. “We can’t hamper our ability to win that race.”
YouTube on Thursday announced new video creation tools for Shorts, its short-form video feed that competes against TikTok.
The features come at a time when TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is at risk of an effective ban in the U.S. if it’s not sold to an American owner by April 5.
Among the new tools is an updated video editor that allows creators to make precise adjustments and edits, a feature that automatically syncs video cuts to the beat of a song and AI stickers.
The creator tools will become available later this spring, said YouTube, which is owned by Google.
Along with the new features, YouTube last week said it was changing the way view counts are tabulated on Shorts. Under the new guidelines, Shorts views will count the number of times the video is played or replayed with no minimum watch time requirement.
Previously, views were only counted if a video was played for a certain number of seconds. This new tabulation method is similar to how views are counted on TikTok and Meta’s Reels, and will likely inflate view counts.
“We got this feedback from creators that this is what they wanted. It’s a way for them to better understand when their Shorts have been seen,” YouTube Chief Product Officer Johanna Voolich said in a YouTube video. “It’s useful for creators who post across multiple platforms.”
CEO of Meta and Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attend the inauguration ceremony before Donald Trump is sworn in as the 47th U.S. president in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington, Jan. 20, 2025.
Saul Loeb | Via Reuters
Technology stocks plummeted Thursday after President Donald Trump’s new tariff policies sparked widespread market panic.
Apple led the declines among the so-called “Magnificent Seven” group, dropping nearly 9%. The iPhone maker makes its devices in China and other Asian countries. The stock is on pace for its steepest drop since 2020.
Other megacaps also felt the pressure. Meta Platforms and Amazon fell more than 7% each, while Nvidia and Tesla slumped more than 5%. Nvidia builds its new chips in Taiwan and relies on Mexico for assembling its artificial intelligence systems. Microsoft and Alphabet both fell about 2%.
The drop in technology stocks came amid a broader market selloff spurred by fears of a global trade war after Trump unveiled a blanket 10% tariff on all imported goods and a range of higher duties targeting specific countries after the bell Wednesday. He said the new tariffs would be a “declaration of economic independence” for the U.S.
Companies and countries worldwide have already begun responding to the wide-sweeping policy, which included a 34% tariff on China stacked on a previous 20% tax, a 46% duty on Vietnam and a 20% levy on imports from the European Union.
China’s Ministry of Commerce urged the U.S. to “immediately cancel” the unilateral tariff measures and said it would take “resolute counter-measures.”
The tariffs come on the heels of a rough quarter for the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the worst period for the index since 2022. Stocks across the board have come under pressure over concerns of a weakening U.S. economy. The Nasdaq Composite dropped nearly 5% on Thursday, bringing its year-to-date loss to 13%.
Trump applauded some megacap technology companies for investing money into the U.S. during his speech, calling attention to Apple’s plan to spend $500 billion over the next four years.