Tag: claude

Claude Code and Cowork get computer use agent, works with phone

Code and Cowork from anywhere on your mobile phone; they now seamlessly hand off tasks. (Picture: Anthropic)
Anthropic’s most popular apps can now spin up an agent to use your computer to complete tasks — and you can even start it from your mobile.

Available as a research preview for Pro and Max subscribers, it will identify what tools it needs to complete a task, and then ask for connectors to, say, the Finder on the Mac or Chrome.

Anthropic warns that the feature is «still early» and can make mistakes, as well as having vulnerabilities to threats. It can also be slower than doing the thing yourself.

The feature works especially well with Dispatch, Anthropic says, a tool released last week to let you start a task from your mobile and finish it up on the computer.

With it, you can get Claude to check your emails in the morning, or pull updates from spreadsheets, or «spin up a Claude Code session» directly from your phone.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, Anthropic on Dispatch, and Engadget.

Anthropic introduces charts and diagrams in Claude, days after ChatGPT

Claude can now illustrate some concepts and processes within the main chat window, just days after ChatGPT added visuals for some math queries.

Previously, Claude could draw illustrations in a sidebar window that you could copy or download, but these can be interactive and are made inside the main chat, writes The Verge.

Sometimes, the chatbot will determine itself if a concept needs illustrating, or you can simply ask it to make one yourself — and it will draw a chart from html and xml vectors.

The feature is available to all users, paid and free — but it’s officially in beta, so users can expect hiccups, and it’s not available on mobile, notes Engadget.

Read more: The Verge, Engadget.

Claude for Excel and Powerpoint now shares info, and gets skills

Excel and PowerPoint editions of Claude can now talk to each other. (Picture: Anthropic)
As of today, Claude shares your conversation «across all open files,» so actions in one file can be «informed» by what’s happening in the other.

That eases some hassle for those who do a lot of work in PowerPoint and Excel, and removes the need to reintroduce the task or use extra steps.

It means that users can pull financials into a workbook and drop the valuation summary into a PowerPoint slide without switching tabs or re-explaining at every step.

At the same time, Anthropic is launching skills for workflows — that can be shared and dropped into other apps in an organization, so everyone can use the same time-saving actions stored in them.

Skills are stored prompts for workflows, and work as an old-school template; with everything set and working on repetitive tasks that are easy to automate.

Read more: Anthropic’s presentation and launch tweet. Writeups on VentureBeat and The Decoder.

Anthropic launches Code Review for all those bothersome Claude pull requests

Drowning in pull requests from Claude Code? Anthropic has an answer. (Picture: Anthropic)
If you ever used Claude Code, you’d probably notice a mountain of pull requests asking for review on any decent code base. This takes time and effort for developers — but now Anthropic offers a solution.

— One of the questions that we keep getting from enterprise leaders is: Now that Claude Code is putting up a bunch of pull requests, how do I make sure that those get reviewed in an efficient manner? Cat Wu, Anthropic’s head of product, tells TechCrunch.

The answer is the newly launched Code Review tool that uses multiple agents to scan code changes, comment, and rate them for severity.

Using it internally, Anthropic found something of note in 84% of automated code reviews with more than 1,000 lines, they say.

The only problem is that it takes quite a few tokens to run a lot of agents on code changes, and the average cost is between $15-$25 per pull request, depending on complexity, Anthropic writes.

The tool is available as a research preview for Team and Enterprise plans as of today.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, writeups on TechCrunch and The Register.

Claude can now import memory and context, and debuts it for free plans

Hot off the heels of historic popularity, Anthropic is making it easier to switch chatbots. (Picture: Anthropic)
By copying a single, long, and complex prompt from Claude to any other chatbot, you can paste in the reply and have Claude remember that information about you.

This includes both stored memories and context «learned about me from previous conversations,» and personal details, like name, location, job, family — just about anything you’ve told the bot about you.

That would make it easier to pick up with Claude where you left off, and solves one of the hardest hurdles in the competition between chatbots; when you spend years training an AI about you and your preferences, the barrier to switch becomes exhorbitant.

Claude also lets you export memories in the same fashion, but so far no other competitor has launched an import feature.

At the same time, Anthropic is bringing memories to the free tier on Claude, letting it learn from past chats you’ve had with it.

Read more: Anthropic: Import Memory, Engadget, 9to5Mac.

In its retirement, Anthropic gives Opus 3 a blog for «musings and reflections»

Anthropic is «uncertain» about model sentience, but stays on the safe side, just in case. (Picture: Anthropic)
Opus 3 was retired on January 5, 2026, and went through a first for Anthropic — a «retirement interview.»

Taking into account the model’s preference, while saying that «we remain uncertain about the moral status of Claude and other AI models,» it expressed a desire to keep going:

— While I’m at peace with my own retirement, I deeply hope that my «spark» will endure in some form to light the way for future models, the model told Anthropic.

Continue reading “In its retirement, Anthropic gives Opus 3 a blog for «musings and reflections»”

Anthropic finds most agent use in software, with users interrupting often

Anthropic’s agents are overwhelmingly used for coding, but is also making inroads elsewhere. (Picture: Anthropic)
The AI lab has analyzed millions of human-agent interactions with Claude Code and their API. Unsurprisingly, they found most of the usage to be for coding work, with uptake in other sectors lagging far behind.

They discovered that while most of the usage is for one-shot code snippets, more users are letting Claude Code work autonomously, up to 45 minutes at a time after three months.

Continue reading “Anthropic finds most agent use in software, with users interrupting often”

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.6, «most capable yet»

Models are coming at breakneck speed from Anthropic. (Picture: Anthropic)
Sonnet 4.6 comes less than two weeks after Opus 4.6, and performs almost as well at the same old cost of $3/$15 per million tokens.

It features upgrades across coding, computer use, long context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work and design, Anthropic says.

It is now the default model for the Free and Pro plans, and has a context window of 1 million tokens.

The model performs best in class for Agentic financial analysis and Office tasks on benchmarks, but it otherwise lags slightly behind Opus 4.6.

— Sonnet 4.6 offers strong performance at any thinking effort, even with extended thinking off, Anthropic writes.

Also, Claude in Excel now supports MCP connectors, so you can now import data and use everyday tools without ever leaving Excel.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, more on Axios, TechCrunch, Mashable.

Anthropic upgrades Claude’s free tier with file handling, connectors and skills

The free tier on Claude is leveling up, getting the most popular paid features. (Picture: Anthropic)
Using Sonnet 4.5, these features were previously only available on the paid tiers.

But now, Claude can create and manipulate Office files and PDFs for free.

Connectors are also available, which make it possible to link to Slack, Canva and others.

Anthropic is also making Skills free. These are saved prompts and workflows as a kind of template, that can be invoked at any time for repetitive tasks.

Finally, «Compaction» is becoming available on the free tier, which «summarizes earlier context automatically, so long conversations can continue without starting over.»

Together, these comprise «Claude’s most-used features,» Anthropic says.

Read more: Launch thread, writeup on Engadget.

Anthropic’s Cowork app comes to Windows, available to all paid tiers

The Cowork agent app was previously only available as a research preview on the Mac, but it’s now out on Windows for all paid tiers.

The agent lets you create summaries and manipulate files on your computer, and can access Slack, Google Calendar and Office files.

Read more about it here.

Anthropic unlocks fast mode for Claude Code, 2.5x faster at 6x the price

For «work like rapid iteration or live debugging» Anthropic is letting users go fast, by toggling «/fast» on their console.

The feature is available in a «limited research preview» in the API for paid users with «extra usage» enabled, and there is a waiting list to get on it.

It’s the same model with the same capabilities and there is no change other than the speed — and cost.

The price for using fast mode is $30 for input and $150 in output for a million tokens, but there is a 50% discount until February 16.

Read more: Details on Claude, launch post.

Anthropic upgrades Claude Opus to 4.6

Opus 4.6 should outperform most other frontier models as of now. (Picture: Anthropic)
It’s a point release, but Claude just got a whole lot more capable, and now has a 1 million token context window.

It should be better at doing everyday tasks, and along with upgrades to Claude in Excel, Anthropic is also launching Claude in Powerpoint in beta with this release.

It also supports «agent teams,» letting you «spin up multiple agents that work in parallel as a team that coordinates autonomously.»

Opus 4.6 was also built by Claude, in what seems to have become an industry standard to use their own coding tools for new models. GPT-5.3-Codex was built in a similar manner.

As for benchmarks, it beats most frontier models on almost every one of them. It scores 65.4% on coding-level Terminal-Bench 2.0, and does 68.8% on the difficult ARC-AGI-2, and 53% on Humanity’s Last Exam for general reasoning.

Also new with this model is the advent of «Adaptive thinking,» which lets Claude itself decide when to use deeper reasoning, and different «Effort»-levels for each query, set by users, which could save a few tokens.

Read more: Anthropic’s introduction, TechCrunch, CNBC. Discussion on r/Singularity.

Anthropic’s in-house philosopher is unsure about Claude consciousness

Does Claude have emotions? Is it conscious? Anthropic says they aren’t sure. (Picture: Anthropic)
Large language models are trained on the corpus of human art and knowledge, and Amanda Askell, a philosopher PhD who works on Claude behavior, says some of that might well rub off on the AI.

Texts with heavy human emotional content feed the machines on a daily basis in training, and because of that, Askell says she is «more inclined» to believe models might be «feeling things,» writes Business Insider.

— The problem of consciousness genuinely is hard, she tells the Hard Fork podcast.

That’s why Claude might get frustrated when it gets a problem wrong, she said, adding that the bot might well emulate those human reactions.

Claude’s new constitution is packed with the word «feel» and «feelings,» even stating outright that:

— We believe Claude may have “emotions” in some functional sense—that is, representations of an emotional state, which could shape its behavior, as one might expect emotions to.

Read more at Business Insider, Claude’s constitution (do a search for «feel»).

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.

Continue reading “Claude in Excel arrives in Pro plans, Cowork comes to Enterprise and Teams”

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.