Anthropic releases business chatbot in hunt for corporate dollars

By Stephen Nellis

(Reuters) - Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic launched a version of its latest chatbot technology aimed at businesses on Wednesday, jumping into the race to capture corporate dollars.

The San Francisco-based firm, backed by Alphabet and Amazon.com, in March released a family of artificial intelligence models called Claude 3 that it says outperforms those from rivals such as Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google.

On Wednesday, it released an app for Apple's iPhones that will offer Claude 3 to businesses at a rate of $30 per user per month. They can sign up for a plan with a minimum of 5 users.

The move sets up more direct competition with OpenAI, which is also selling a plan aimed at businesses at the same rate. But Anthropic's new enterprise technology push could also bring it into competition with its backers Google and Amazon, who also want to capture business spending on AI.

Such tensions are already arising elsewhere in the booming AI sector. Reuters reported last month that OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman pitched his firm's business offering directly to some of Microsoft's biggest customers.

One of Claude 3's biggest features is the ability ingest a lot of data - about the length of two books - and summarize it, analyze it or pull out a single piece of data accurately. Anthropic said it can be used by finance teams to generate investment reports, engineering teams working on large bases of code or sales teams collaborating on how to land a large client.

"Claude is particularly good at a combination of structured and unstructured data," Daniela Amodei, Anthropic's president, said in an interview.

"So you can upload a chart, a set of documents, like a PDF, some like Slack exchanges and say, 'Hey, all of these are talking about an upcoming product launch or recent earnings report. Can you summarize all of them for me, Claude, and give me the key highlights or pieces of information?' And Claude can do that."

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Michael Erman)