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.”
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
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LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.
The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.
“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.
He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.
Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.
“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”
Undecided on location
Founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup that competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
The company divides its business into three main camps: consumer-facing voice assistants, integrations with corporates such as Cisco, and tailor-made applications for specific industries like health care.
Staniszewski said the firm hasn’t yet decided where it could list, but that this decision will largely rest on where most of its users are located at the time.
“If the U.K. is able to start accelerating,” ElevenLabs will consider London as a listing destination, Staniszewski said.
The city has faced criticisms from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that its stock market is unfavorable toward high-growth tech firms.
Meanwhile, British money transfer firm Wiselast month said it plans to move its primary listing location to the U.S.,
Fundraising plans
ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.
Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
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Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.