Amazon-backed Anthropic debuts AI agents that can do complex tasks, racing against OpenAI, Microsoft and Google

Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup founded by former OpenAI research executives, announced Tuesday that it’s reached an artificial intelligence milestone for the company: AI agents that can use a computer to complete complex tasks like a human would.

Anthropic is the company behind Claude — one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, has exploded in popularity. Startups like Anthropic, alongside tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, are all part of a generative AI arms race to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.

Anthropic’s new Computer Use capability, part of its two newest AI models, allows its tech to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing.

The tool can “use computers in basically the same way that we do,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview, adding it can do tasks with “tens or even hundreds of steps.”

Amazon had early access to the tool, Anthropic told CNBC, and early customers and beta testers included Asana, Canva and Notion. The company has been working on the tool since early this year, according to Kaplan.

Anthropic released the feature Tuesday in public beta for developers. The team hopes to open up use to consumers and enterprise clients over the next few months, or early next year, per Kaplan.

Anthropic said that future consumer applications include booking flights, scheduling appointments, filling out forms, conducting online research and filing expense reports.

“We want Claude to be able to actually assist people with all sorts of different kinds of work, and we think the chatbot setup is fairly limited because you can ask a question and [get] context but it stops there,” Kaplan told CNBC.

After the viral popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the industry quickly moved past text responses into AI-generated photos, videos and voice. Now, startups and Big Tech alike are going all in on AI agents.

Rather than just providing answers — the realm of chatbots and image generators — agents are built for productivity and to complete multistep, complex tasks on a user’s behalf. And though the term isn’t neatly defined across the tech sector, AI agents are viewed as a step beyond chatbots, in that they’re typically designed for specific business functions and can be customized on large AI models. Think of J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony Stark’s multifaceted AI assistant from the Marvel Universe.

Grace Isford, a partner at venture firm Lux Capital, told CNBC in June that there’s been a “dramatic increase” in interest among tech investors in startups focused on building AI agents. They’ve collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars and seen their valuations climb alongside the broader generative AI market.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on an earnings call earlier this year that he wants to offer an AI agent that can complete more tasks on a user’s behalf, though there is “a lot of execution ahead.” Executives from Meta and Google have also touted their work in pushing AI agents to become increasingly productive.

Anthropic has become one of the hottest AI startups since it released the first version of Claude in March 2023, a product that directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer markets, without any consumer access or major fanfare. Backers include Google, Salesforce and Amazon, Since January, it has introduced iOS and Android apps, a Team plan for businesses, and an international expansion into Europe.

″[We’re] moving to a world where these models will behave much more like virtual collaborators than virtual assistants,” Scott White, a product manager at Anthropic, told CNBC in September.

Anthropic’s Tuesday announcements are the latest step in its long-term strategy to build those virtual collaborators, or agents.

Last month, Anthropic rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since its chatbot’s debut, designed for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic’s AI. The enterprise product’s beta testers and early clients included GitLab, Midjourney and Menlo Ventures, according to the company.

Claude Enterprise allows clients to upload relevant documents with a much larger context window than before — the equivalent of 100 30-minute sales conversations, 100,000 lines of code or 15 full financial reports, according to Anthropic. The plan also allows “activity feeds” for super-users within a company to show those newer to AI how others are using the technology, White said.

The Claude Enterprise launch followed Anthropic’s June debut of its more powerful Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and its May rollout of its “Team” plan for smaller businesses.

In June, 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.

Artifacts, or “workspaces” that allow users to “see, edit and build upon Claude’s creations in real time,” White told CNBC in September, will allow Anthropic’s enterprise-level clients to create marketing calendars, feed in sales data, make dashboards or forecasts, draft code for features, write legal documents, summarize complex contracts, automate legal tasks and more.

Shortly after Anthropic’s debut of Teams in May, Mike Krieger, co-founder and former chief technology officer of Meta-owned Instagram, joined the company as chief product officer. Under Krieger, the platform grew to 1 billion users and its engineering team increased to more than 450 people, according to a press release. OpenAI’s former safety leader, Jan Leike, joined the company that same month.