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OpenAI competitor Anthropic on Thursday announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its most powerful artificial intelligence model yet.

Claude is one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini, has exploded in popularity in the past year. Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including Google, Salesforce and Amazon. In the past year, it’s closed five different funding deals totaling about $7.3 billion.

The news follows Anthropic’s debut of its Claude 3 family of models in March and OpenAI’s GPT-4o in May. The company said Claude 3.5 Sonnet is faster than its previous leading model, Claude 3 Opus, and is the first model from Anthropic’s new Claude 3.5 family.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is free from the company’s website, Claude.ai, and in the Claude iPhone app. Claude Pro and Team subscribers can access the latest model with higher rate limits.

“It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone,” the company said in a blog post. It can also write, edit and execute code.

Anthropic also announced “Artifacts,” which it said allows a user to ask its Claude chatbot to, for example, generate a text document or code and then opens the result in a dedicated window. “This creates a dynamic workspace where they can see, edit, and build upon Claude’s creations in real-time,” the company said, adding that it expects Artifacts will be useful for code development, legal contract drafting and analysis, business report writing and more.

Claude Artifacts

As startups like Anthropic and OpenAI gain steam in the generative AI business, they — alongside tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta — have been part of an AI arms race to integrate the technology to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market that’s predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

News of Anthropic’s new model follows the company’s debut in May of its first-ever enterprise offering.

The plan for businesses, dubbed Team, had 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 last month. The idea for the service was partially borne out of many of those same customers asking for a dedicated enterprise product, Amodei added.

“So much of what we were hearing from enterprise businesses is people are kind of using Claude at the office already,” Amodei said at the time.

Last month, shortly after Anthropic’s new product debut, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger joined the company as chief product officer. Krieger, the former chief technology officer of Meta-owned Instagram, grew the platform to 1 billion users and increased its engineering team to more than 450 people during his time there, per a release. OpenAI’s former safety leader Jan Leike also joined the company in May.

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Elon Musk endorses far-right Alternative for Germany party in upcoming election

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Elon Musk endorses far-right Alternative for Germany party in upcoming election

Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk gestures behind protective glass during a rally for Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. president Donald Trump, at the site of the July assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, U.S., October 5, 2024.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a meagdonor and adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, is now seeking to influence Germany’s election, posting an endorsement on X of the country’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

In a post Thursday night, Musk wrote, “Only the AfD can save Germany.”

Musk, who has over 200 million listed followers on the site that he owns, made the comment while sharing a post from far-right influencer, Naomi Seibt, who claimed that Germany’s “presumptive next chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) is horrified by the idea that Germany should follow Elon Musk’s and Javier Milei’s example,” referring to the president of Argentina.

Seibt has a history of promoting white nationalist ideology, The Guardian previously reported, and has denied the validity of scientific consensus around climate change, namely that it’s driven by fossil fuel emissions.

In a post on X, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) called Musk an “out of touch billionaire running the incoming Trump Administration” who “enthusiastically supports the neo-Nazi party in Germany.”

“The AfD’s mission is to rehabilitate the image of the Nazi movement,” Murphy wrote. He added that one of the party’s leaders has a license plate that’s “an open tribute to Hitler,” and another “described Judaism as the ‘inner enemy’ in Germany.”

Musk and Tesla’s investor relations team didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

On Friday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, a center-left Social Democrat, dismissed Musk’s claim that only the far-right party can “save Germany.”

Under Scholz’s leadership, Germany‘s left-wing coalition collapsed in November, and AfD is currently polling in second place ahead of February elections. Throughout Germany, where the AfD has placed highly in state elections, the other parties have generally refused to form coalitions with it. 

According to Pew Research, “AfD has campaigned against weapon deliveries to Ukraine and called for an end to sanctions on Russia,” a view shared by Musk.

Far right parties have also gained ground in the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and elsewhere. Many cheered Trump’s election, which Musk helped finance through $277 million in contributions to the campaign and related Republican causes.

Tesla’s stock is up about 75% since Trump’s victory, surpassing its prior all-time high from 2021 last week.

AfD has reportedly criticized Tesla and its factory outside of Berlin. The party claimed many of Tesla’s thousands of workers there commute in from Poland or Berlin, limiting the economic benefits to the local community in Brandeburg.

The AfD generally views electric vehicles as part of an ideological climate movement, and not good for Germany’s auto industry.

Europe has been a tough market for Tesla this year. According to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, sales of Tesla cars declined 40.9% in November, exceeding the overall 9.5% dip in sales of battery electric vehicles.

Elsewhere in Euopre, Musk endorsed right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and has voiced support for Nigel Farage in the U.K, a populist politician and head of Reform UK. In South America, Musk endorsed and has a friendship with Argentina’s President Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist.

WATCH: Musk’s early influence on government

Surprised how much influence Elon Musk and Trump already have on government: Tenacity's Ben Narasin

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Bitcoin falls 8% in volatile trade around $93,000 as sell-off intensifies

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Bitcoin falls 8% in volatile trade around ,000 as sell-off intensifies

Omer Taha Cetin | Anadolu | Getty Images

Bitcoin fell sharply on Friday amid broader investor caution toward risk assets.

Bitcoin dipped below the $93,000 mark earlier in the day before trading above that price in volatile trade.

By around 8:26 ET, bitcoin was trading at $93,809.39, according to Coin Metrics, down around 8% from 24 hours before when it was priced above $102,000.

The cryptocurrency hit an all-time high above $108,000 just this week, but has since sold off aggressively.

The Federal Reserve rattled markets in recent days, as it signaled fewer interest rate cuts next year. Equity markets took a hit, filtering through to crypto assets.

The price of bitcoin price has more than doubled this year, supported by a number of factors including the launch of spot exchange-traded funds and the U.S. presidential election of Donald Trump. He has pledged pro-crypto policies and his victory at the polls helped propel bitcoin to its latest record high.

With some markets on edge due to the Fed, some of the steam has come out of assets that have seen big gains this year.

Tesla, which has been another big beneficiary of Trump’s win, continued its post-election slide with shares falling on Friday in premarket trade. Other big names like Nvidia were also lower during the session.

Bitcoin’s fall also dragged down other cryptocurrencies. Ether was down around 12%, and XRP plunged 10% from 24 hours prior, at around 8:27 a.m. ET.

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Tesla shares drop 5%, continuing to slide as post-election rally loses steam

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Tesla shares drop 5%, continuing to slide as post-election rally loses steam

Tesla electric vehicles are parked in a parking lot at the Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg plant. 

Patrick Pleul | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Shares of Tesla continued to slide on Friday, in what appeared to be a case of investors taking profits from the electric car maker’s blistering post-U.S. election rally.

As of around 6:30 a.m. ET, the firm’s shares were down nearly 5% in U.S. premarket trading, extending losses from earlier in the week. On Wednesday, Tesla shares slumped 8% to post their worst day since before Donald Trump’s presidential election victory in November.

Trump’s win prompted a sharp rally in Tesla shares, as investors increased their bets that the electric vehicle firm would benefit thanks to its CEO Elon Musk’s close ties to the president-elect. The stock is still up around 65% since Nov. 5’s market close — the night of the U.S. presidential vote.

Musk was appointed by Trump to co-lead the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, also referred to as “DOGE.” The proposed presidential advisory commission’s acronym shares the same name as the internet meme that inspired so-called “memecoin” cryptocurrency, dogecoin.

Dogecoin briefly shot up in price after the body’s creation.

Musk was a major backer of Trump during the Republican’s election run, pouring in $277 million primarily into his campaign effort, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Musk is the world’s richest person, with a net worth of $439.4 billion, according to Forbes data.

Last month, Bloomberg News reported Trump’s transition team was planning to pursue a federal framework for regulating self-driving vehicles.

Tesla and Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment on the report.

If true, the move would offer a major boost to Musk’s EV firm. Tesla is staking its future on the idea of rolling out mass fleets of autonomous vehicles, known as “robotaxi” services. At the firm’s “We Robot” event in October, Musk unveiled the firm’s Cybercab self-driving concept car.

Tesla has yet to deliver on Musk’s promise of offering truly autonomous vehicles. Tesla’s Autopilot and paid “Full Self-Driving” services still require a human behind the wheel to supervise the system’s actions and take over if needed.

In other Tesla-related news, data released by the European Automobile Manufacturers Association on Thursday showed sales of Tesla cars declined 40.9% in November, exceeding the overall 9.5% dip in sales of battery electric cars (BEVs) in the bloc.

Separately, Tesla also on Friday said it was recalling nearly 700,000 vehicles in the U.S. due to an issue with its tire pressure monitoring system. Software-related recalls aren’t typically a huge issue for Tesla, however, as it can issue “over-the-air” updates to fix these issues.

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