Amazon-backed Anthropic rolls out Claude AI for big business

Anthropic on Wednesday rolled out Claude Enterprise, its biggest new product since its chatbot’s debut and a step up for businesses looking to integrate Anthropic’s artificial intelligence.

The Amazon-backed AI startup, founded by former OpenAI research executives, is the company behind Claude — one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini, has exploded in popularity in recent years.

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

GitLab, Midjourney and Menlo Ventures have all been beta-testers and early clients of Claude Enterprise, along with North Highland Consulting and Sourcegraph. GitLab used the product for content creation and responding to requests for proposals in a more automated way, Scott White, a product manager at Anthropic, told CNBC in an interview.

“[We’re] moving to a world where these models will behave much more like virtual collaborators than virtual assistants,” White said.

Claude Enterprise allows clients to upload relevant documents with a much larger context window than before, which translates to the equivalent of 100 different 30-minute sales conversations, 100,000 lines of code or 15 full financial reports. The plan also allows “activity feeds” for super-users within a company to show those newer to AI how they’re making use of the technology, White said.

Pricing will depend on each organization’s needs, an Anthropic representative told CNBC, but factors will include scale of usage, like number of users and query volume, and specific feature requirements such as depth of integration.

Anthropic also highlighted enterprise privacy in a presentation viewed by CNBC, which outlined the plan’s role-based access and project-based invitations, as well as audit logs coming soon. “Anthropic does not train our models on your Claude for Work data,” a slide said.

About a dozen dedicated people work on Claude Enterprise, and the company has working on the product since at least January, White said. So far, a wide range of industries have expressed interest in the product, he said, including companies in the legal and consulting spaces, as well as financial services and software.

The Claude Enterprise launch follows Anthropic’s June debut of its most powerful AI model yet, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and its May rollout of its “Team” plan for smaller businesses.

The Team plan 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 at the time. The idea for the service was partially borne out of many of those same customers asking for a dedicated enterprise product, Amodei added.

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. “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.

Artifacts, or “workspaces” that allow users to “see, edit and build upon Claude’s creations in real time,” are a key draw for clients to Claude Enterprise, White told CNBC. The feature will allow Enterprise 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, 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 joined the company that same month

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.