#anthropic

#anthropic

Anthropic has distinguished itself from competitors by staying laser-focused on its enterprise customers with offerings catered to make working professionals' lives easier. The Skills feature, launched in October, aimed to do just that, and now it has received an upgrade, making it easier for organizations to take advantage. With the Skills feature, users can provide Claude with a set of instructions, including resources like brand guidelines, so that the chatbot can reference them when performing specialized tasks autonomously.

What if the chatbots we talk to every day actually felt something? What if the systems writing essays, solving problems, and planning tasks had preferences, or even something resembling suffering? And what will happen if we ignore these possibilities? Those are the questions Kyle Fish is wrestling with as Anthropic's first in-house AI welfare researcher. His mandate is both audacious and straightforward: Determine whether models like Claude can have conscious experiences, and, if so, how the company should respond.

The Anthropic CEO spent a good chunk of the interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin drawing a careful line between his company's approach and that of a certain competitor. When asked about whether the AI industry is in a bubble, Amodei separated the "technological side" from the "economic side" and then twisted the knife. "On the technological side, I feel really solid," he said.

On Monday, Anthropic announced Opus 4.5, the latest version of its flagship model. It's the last of Anthropic's 4.5 series of models to be released, following the launch of Sonnet 4.5 in September and Haiku 4.5 in October. As expected, the new version of Opus has state-of-the-art performance on a range of benchmarks, including coding benchmarks (SWE-Bench and Terminal-bench), tool use (tau2-bench and MCP Atlas) and general problem solving (ARC-AGI 2, GPQA Diamond).

This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers, Nadella said on a video call with the other two executives, adding that it builds on the critical partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.

"I think I'm deeply uncomfortable with these decisions being made by a few companies, by a few people," Amodei told Anderson Cooper in a "60 Minutes" episode that aired Sunday. "Like who elected you and Sam Altman?" asked Anderson. "No one. Honestly, no one," Amodei replied.

Anthropic is scrambling to assert its political neutrality as the Trump administration intensifies its campaign against so-called "woke AI," placing itself at the center of an increasingly ideological fight over how large language models should talk about politics. In a detailed post Thursday, Anthropic unveiled a sweeping effort to train its Claude chatbot to behave with what it calls "political even-handedness," a framework meant to ensure the model treats competing viewpoints "with equal depth, engagement, and quality of analysis."

We're getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren't possible before.

Google is in early discussions to deepen its investment in Anthropic, Business Insider has learned. The new round of funding could value Anthropic at more than $350 billion, according to one source familiar with the matter. The potential new deal, which is still being negotiated and is in flux, could also take the form of a strategic investment where Google provides additionalcloud computing servicesto Anthropic, a convertible note, or a priced funding round early next year, according to sources familiar with the matter.

In a statement, Anthropic said that Claude for Excel will allow users to "work directly with Claude in a sidebar in Microsoft Excel, where Claude can read, analyze, modify, and create new Excel workbooks." It promised that "Claude listens carefully, follows instructions precisely, and thinks through complex problems." More practically, it said Excel users will be able to ask the LLM about specific formulas or worksheets, with "cell-level citations so you can verify the logic."

Never mind Sam Altman's Stargate, which is just beginning to open its portal to distant AI-fueled worlds: Amazon's competing mountain of AI compute power is already up and running. Amazon Web Services today announced that Project Rainier, its Stargate-rivaling AI "UltraCluster", is now up and running, with "nearly half a million" Trainium2 chips serving the massive machine across multiple datacenters.

The idea of automating tasks for desktop users is not entirely novel. Last year in October, Anthropic became the first LLM provider to showcase the possibility of controlling a computer or some parts of its operating system. That ability, which Anthropic had termed "computer use," enabled developers to instruct Claude 3.5 Sonnet, through the Anthropic API, to read and interpret what's on the display, type text, move the cursor, click buttons, and switch between windows or applications.

Discussions are still in the early stages, but Google and Claude creator Anthropic are considering a cloud agreement worth tens of billions of dollars. This would allow Anthropic to use Google's AI computing power. Google, itself an investor in Anthropic, would already see a significant return on its investment under the agreement. It has invested approximately $3 billion in two investment rounds in the AI company.

AI itself is known for its bigness - it's in the name, large language model. On the ground, techies are going small. AI heads are crawling for exclusive, small-batch merchandise to flaunt on X and show just how inner circle they are. As AI merch booms, it's clearer than ever that these companies - both massive foundation model companies and startups - have hit the mainstream.These days, AI status symbols are popping up everywhere.

"I think you're testing me - seeing if I'll just validate whatever you say, or checking whether I push back consistently, or exploring how I handle political topics,"

In the race to build brands around AI assistants, the stakes are higher than empathy. This week's debut brand marketing campaigns from OpenAI and Anthropic made that clear, and in retrospect, cast Perplexity's earlier campaign in a sharper light. These aren't brands trying to be relatable. They're trying to normalize a seismic shift in human-machine interaction. As Neil Barrie, co-founder and global CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, put it: "All of them are building brands around weapons grade power."

We already see that there is now a shortage of people who possess MCP skills that we are hiring for,