Tag: anthropic

Claude in Excel arrives in Pro plans, Cowork comes to Enterprise and Teams

Working on both macOS and Windows, Claude in Excel is useful for testing scenarios without breaking formulas, navigating complex models, and debugging entire worksheets.

At the same time, Anthropic says that their recently launched Cowork agent is expanding availablity.

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Anthropic uses Claude to write new Claude «constitution»

Claude’s new constitution is written in part by asking Claude. (Picture: Anthropic)
Claude has gotten a new constitution, written in part with the help from previous versions of Claude — and it marks a change in Anthropic’s approach

— While writing the constitution, we sought feedback from various external experts (as well as asking for input from prior iterations of Claude), Anthropic says.

The new constitution is going to tell Claude how to behave in broader, more ethical terms, they write.

This is a departure from previous constitutions that were big long lists of specific principles and interactions, that detailed how Claude would act.

The bot needs to generalize more to decide on situations not predicted in the written guide, Anthropic says.

The constitution for Claude is the «foundational document» for how the bot should act, and is used in both training and inference (as in day-to-day use). It is supposed to be a living document, getting updated continuously as Anthropic sees how the bot behaves.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, the actual Constitution. Writeups on TechCrunch, Time.com, Axios.

Anthropic launches computer use agent Cowork — as a macOS app

Available as a research preview for Max users on macOS, the agent can both handle your files and create new ones.

Based on Claude Code users surprising their developers, using the tool to manipulate local files — Anthropic is now launching an app that does just that.

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Anthropic signs deal for $10 billion funding at a $350 billion valuation

The Claude makers value just keeps soaring. (Picture: Adobe)
Hot off the heels from discussing a $300 billion valuation, Anthropic is raising the bar in its latest funding round.

The leading financiers are Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and Coatue Management, which are forking out $10 billion to the AI lab’s coffers.

Recently, Anthropic started testing the IPO market in what would be the strongest market debut for quite some time.

They also got a $30 billion investment from Microsoft and Nvidia in late November, and started this funding round in December.

It works out to a respectable middle ground for Anthropic, valuing the company between xAI’s recent $230 billion and OpenAI’s well documented worth of $500 billion.

Read more: Reuters and CNBC.

Anthropic and OpenAI are doubling usage limits until New Year’s

The most popular AI coding platforms are joining in doubling limits this Christmas. (Picture: Adobe)
From Christmas Eve til New Years Eve, you can do a lot of extra coding with Claude and Codex.

Anthropic started the party with Claude, offering Pro and Max users twice the usual limits to close out the year:

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Anthropic begins testing IPO waters, hires specialist firm that helped Google

Anthropic has started laying the groundworks for an initial public offering.
With a valuation north of $300 billion, Anthropic would be one of the world’s largest IPOs. (Picture: generated)
Just as the AI lab is chasing a funding round said to value it at more than $300 billion, The Financial Times reports they are also considering going public.

This stems from hiring Wilson Sonsini, which assisted Google and LinkedIn in their initial public offerings, and apparently having talks with «big investment banks.» They have also hired Krishna Rao, the former Airbnb executive who played a key role in their IPO in 2020, CNBC says.

The timeline does not seem clear, while the report indicates that it could happen as soon as 2026, it also notes that the talks are in informal and early stages.

Anthropic has 300,000 business and enterprise customers, and is aiming to triple its annual revenue to around $26 billion next year, Reuters writes.

Its IPO could be one of the biggest ever, and would be a test of investors’ appetite for loss-making companies with huge investment bills, FT notes.

Read more: Scoop by The Financial Times, writeups from Reuters and CNBC.

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.5, with top scores in most benchmarks

Anthropic's new model is state of the art in most benchmarks.
Opus 4.5 beats every human candidate on Anthropic’s onboarding exam for engineers. (Picture: Anthropic)
Billing it as the «best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use,» Opus 4.5 is indeed state-of-the-art in software engineering.

It scores 80.9% in SWE-bench Verified, the preferred benchmark for coding lately. Gemini 3 has 76.2% in this bench, and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max registers at 77.9%.

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Anthropic partners with Nvidia, Microsoft in $30 billion Azure deal

Anthropic nets a Microsoft investment, and promises to use it all on Microsoft's Azure.
Nvidia and Anthropic will optimize for each other, and use Microsoft’s cloud. (Picture: generated)
The companies will invest some $15 billion in Anthropic, while the AI lab commits to $30B in spending on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud offering.

— We’re increasingly going to be customers of each other. We will use Anthropic models, they will use our infrastructure and we’ll go to market together, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, according to Reuters.

The agreement means Anthropic will optimize their software stack to better run on Nvidia’s hardware, while Nvidia will «optimize for Anthropic workloads.»

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Weekend roundup: Gemini is going to space, Apple chooses Google, and Amazon’s had it with Perplexity

(Picture: generated)

Gemini is launching to orbit
Google’s latest moonshot might almost be literal. They are preparing for sending their TPU processors into low-earth orbit, and maybe then build a proper AI data center in space — where there is ample sunlight to provide it with energy. They have already tested a TPU in orbit conditions in a particle accelerator and it survived, and the next step is the launch of two prototype satellites in early 2027. They call it Project Suncatcher, and say that «in the future, space may be the best place to scale AI compute.»
More at: Sundar Pichai’s tweet, Google’s announcement blog

Google close to Apple deal for AI Siri
Apparently, Apple has chosen Gemini for its upcoming AI version of the Siri assistant. They will use what is likely a custom version of the model with 1.2 trillion parameters, running on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers. Apple supposedly also tested options from OpenAI and Anthropic, but Anthropic’s fees were too high and Apple already partners with Google for search results. The deal will cost Apple $1 billion a year, far less than the $20 billion Google pays Apple to be their search provider.
More at: Bloomberg, MacRumors, TechCrunch.

Read on for more!

Continue reading “Weekend roundup: Gemini is going to space, Apple chooses Google, and Amazon’s had it with Perplexity”

Weekend roundup: Resurrected Clippy, ChatGPT Business and AI Oreo ads

Microsoft wants to put up a nice face for you to talk to with Copilot.

Clippy much? Microsoft launches visualization of Copilot
If you ever use voice mode in Copilot, which Microsoft hopes to expand, you might see a new, expressive animation on your screen. That would be the newly announced «Mico.» Unlike the much maligned Clippy, Mico will use facial expressions that change as you talk. It’s only available in the US, and will work with an upcoming memory feature for Copilot to better respond to requests.
More at: Microsoft’s launch, The Verge and Ars Technica.

OpenAI announces ChatGPT Business
ChatGPT will now combine all the context of your businesses’ connected apps, like Slack, Sharepoint, Github and Google Drive. This makes it possible to ask pretty detailed questions about your business and have comprehensive answers delivered in one place — without the need to go searching through lots of different repositories. The feature is available tor Business, Enterprise and Education customers starting last Thursday.
More at: OpenAI’s launch page, The Verge and The Register.

Read on for more!

Continue reading “Weekend roundup: Resurrected Clippy, ChatGPT Business and AI Oreo ads”

Anthropic launches Haiku 4.5; twice the speed at a third of the cost

Haiku 4.5 offers what would be state of the art performance six months ago, for a fraction of the price.
Haiku 4.5 will be the new face of Anthropic’s free plans, and offers similar performance to Sonnet 4. (Picture: Anthropic)
The latest Haiku model compares in performance with Sonnet 4 — which was state of the art half a year ago.

— What was recently at the frontier is now cheaper and faster. Five months ago, Claude Sonnet 4 was a state-of-the-art model, writes Anthropic. — Today, Claude Haiku 4.5 gives you similar levels of coding performance, but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed.

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Anthropic announces Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Code gets top requests

Sonnet 4.5 should make it easier for novices to code from scratch and for the pros to manage large code bases.
«Code is everywhere,» Anthropic says, and say their new model will make it easier than ever. (Picture: Anthropic)
Anthropic says it’s «the best coding model in the world,» and backs it up with solid leads in the benchmarks.

The model comes hot on the heels of Opus 4.1, the launch of file creation and Claude for Chrome, which all seem to be included in this release.

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Friday roundup: OpenAI deals with Microsoft, makes a movie, and Albania gets an AI-generated minister

The first feature length movie made almost entirely by AI is set to debut at next year's Cannes Festival.
Made with «OpenAI resources,» this movie is built from animated uploaded drawings and prompts. (Picture: Screenshot, Critterz)
Microsoft agrees with OpenAI to keep talking
Microsoft is in a complex business relationship with OpenAI, where the early investor gets access to the latest AI tech and OpenAI gets access to computing power. They have just reached a “non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership.” This could allow OpenAI to go for-profit, under the control of a non-profit entity said to retain an ownership stake of more than $100 billion. Many takes on this today, but OpenAI has been moving away from Microsoft for funding, operations and cloud computing lately. The final deal will likely include some kind of a new investment in the now $500 billion company, and may unlock further market opportunities for OpenAI.
More at: OpenAI and Microsoft’s joint statement, x.com announcement, Reuters, Axios.

OpenAI goes to the movies
A new animated a-list movie, «Critterz» is under development using «OpenAI’s resources.» It should be ready for the Cannes Film Festival, meaning production time will be drastically sped up to only nine months. The script is written by part of the team from «Paddington in Peru», and it is spearheaded by Chad Nelson, who is a creative specialist at OpenAI. The technique looks to be to feed drawings to a large language model and have it animate them. The movie therefore streamlines animation, but wont skimp on voice actors, Gizmodo writes.
More at: The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo and Engadget.

Read on for more news!

Continue reading “Friday roundup: OpenAI deals with Microsoft, makes a movie, and Albania gets an AI-generated minister”

Anthropic’s Claude can now create advanced files for you

Claude's files support Excel, PowerPoint, Word and PDF formats.
Claude can make sophisticated files out of any data you give it. (Picture: Anthropic)
Supporting Excel, PowerPoint and Word formats as well as PDFs, you can now get detailed financial reports and presentations from the chatbot — downloadable as professional files.

If you supply it with the data, like sales reports or statistics, Claude can now use its own sandboxed computer and coding access to provide you with well presented, clean data in file form.

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Anthropic’s copyright settlement to cost $1.5 billion or more

Anthropic will pay $3,000 per book for an estimated 500,000 books, and more if further claims surface.
The Anthropic settlement is predicted to push other AI labs into negotiations over similar claims. (Picture: Adobe)
The landmark court settlement will be the largest copyright payout in history, but Anthropic avoids admitting guilt.

The epic class action lawsuit concerned a library of 7 million pirated books used in training, and had Anthropic looking at $150,000 in penalties per instance of copyright theft, but it was settled last week without disclosing terms.

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