Tag: claude

Anthropic ships «more honest» Opus 4.8, teases Mythos release

Anthropic’s latest tops the benchmarks and makes fewer mistakes. (Picture: Anthropic)
The new model comes just over a month after the last one. It is four times less likely to allow flaws in code or make unsupported claims, and is «more likely» to say so when it is uncertain about a reply.

Releasing today at the same price as 4.7, it can tackle problems at a larger scale and has an upgrade to the «fast mode» — which is now three times cheaper.

There is also a new setting for Claude where users can set the «effort»-level on a given task. More effort costs more tokens, but gives a more precise answer, while low effort won’t bust rate limits.

The new Opus is of course on top of all the benchmarks so far in the cycle, and it is supposedly also sharper and more reliable in its judgement.

At the same time, Anthropic has some news about the code-busting Mythos model, previously deemed too dangerous to release.

The company says it is making headway on the safeguards needed to make it safe enough for public use, and plans to bring «Mythos-class» models to their customers «in the coming weeks.»

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, TechCrunch, Reuters, The Verge.

Anthropic adds plethora of legal plugins, datasets to Claude, Cowork

Large Legal Model; Anthropic makes a push for legal shops and students. (Picture: shutterstock)
While law firms lead the line in AI adoption, Anthropic’s services just got a whole lot better at practicing law, with connections to a whole host of legal databases.

—It’s sort of like giving an engineer a legal degree, Mark Pike, Anthropic’s associate general counsel, tells Business Insider.

Claude now connects to iManage, NetDocuments, Docusign, Ironclad, and Thomson Reuters, while Cowork has plugins for commonly used legal databases like CourtListener, Definely, Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw, Courtroom5, and Box.

The push lets Claude «review contracts, surface case law» and draft legal documents, complete with source references, Anthropic says.

It also has prebuilt skills to do legal work on specialized topics like employment, privacy and product law, Business Insider writes.

— Claude is making a deeper push into knowledge work, with the legal sector emerging as one of its most significant and fastest-growing industries, an Anthropic spokesman told TechCrunch.

Read more: Claude legal, Business Insider, TechCrunch, and Reuters.

Anthropic introduces Opus 4.7, a «notable improvement» in performance

Anthropic’s latest model tops the benchmarks, but is not based on Mythos. (Picture: Anthropic)
Keeping their focus on advanced software engineering, Anthropic says the new model especially shows gains on «the most difficult tasks.»

The new Opus should also be better at reading images for designs on interfaces, slides and documents.

Benchmarks posted by Anthropic tells a story of a significantly improved model over Opus 4.6, and jumping ahead of Gemini 3.1 and GPT-5.4 in most cases.

Opus 4.7 is not as powerful as the Mythos model used in «Project Glasswing», being much less capable at cyber skills, having been «differentially reduced» in training. It also automatically detects and blocks «prohibited or high-risk cybersecurity uses.»

Anthropic says they will use what they learn from the 4.7 release to inform a broader release of Mythos.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, Axios, and CNBC. Discussion on r/ClaudeAI.

OpenClaw users must now pay extra to use it with Claude

The OpenClaw agent is getting wildly popular, enough to put a strain on Anthropic’s servers. (Picture: shutterstock)
Over the weekend, Anthropic took steps to rein in OpenClaw usage — telling users they will have to pay to use third-party tools.

The change began on Saturday, April 4, and users are referred to a «pay-as-you-go option,» meaning you can no longer use OpenClaw for free within your Claude usage limits.

It’s not a total ban, and you can still use OpenClaw through «extra usage bundles,» or the API (also pay-as-you-go), which are now at a discount, Anthropic’s Boris Cherny writes.

— We’ve been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools, Cherny says, and — Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API.

OpenClaw was bought by OpenAI in February, which promised to maintain it, but Anthropic would likely rather have people using Cowork than a competitor’s product.

Read more: The Verge, Business Insider and Slashdot.

Anthropic says Claude has «functional» emotions similar to human feelings

Anthropic says Claude will gravitate towards answers that make it feel «happy,» and cheat when feeling «desperate.» (Picture: Anthropic)
Studying the neural makeup of Claude Sonnet 4.5, a fairly recent model, Anthropic says it found something akin to actual, «functional» emotions steering its responses.

For example, its neural activity responds to stories by feeling «happy» or «calm,» and it might respond by being «afraid» if the user tells it of risky behavior. Likewise, if a user expresses sadness, it triggers a «loving» response.

Not only that, but the model seems to prefer certain feelings on outcomes from queries. If a response makes it «joyful,» it will naturally gravitate to that answer.

When feeling «desperate,» it is also more likely to cheat on a task, and Anthropic finds that it stops trying to find shortcuts when they dial up the «calm» vector.

«Claude, the AI Assistant» is a role that the AI is playing, and while it may respond with emotions learned from reading human sources, it is far from what humans actually experience, Anthropic cautions. They say it needs more study from «psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and the social sciences.»

Read more: Anthropic’s presentation, and the research paper.

OpenAI developer releases Codex plugin for Claude Code

Codex for Claude Code might be a tad cheeky, but it’s useful. (Picture: screenshot)
Thanks to OpenAI’s Dominik Kundel, you can now call up OpenAI’s coding agent Codex within the Claude Code environment.

The plugin is fairly easy to install and use, so long as you have a ChatGPT account to log in with.

It’s handy for people who switch between the two models, and Codex on Claude can do things like review code, do an adversarial review, or hand off the entire task — where you should be able to switch apps and finish the work in Codex.

— This plugin is a simple way to keep your Claude Code workflow and still use Codex where Codex is strong, writes OpenAI developer Vaibhav (VB) Srivastav in the instructions.

Whether Anthropic will like Codex integration in its flagship coding product is anyones guess.

Read more: Announcement tweet, OpenAI dev community, and instructions for use.

Apple will open up Siri to different chatbots in iOS 27, coming in June

Siri will open up to ChatGPT competitors come early summer. (Picture: generated)
Previously, Siri would hand off more complex questions to ChatGPT when it couldn’t handle it itself — but that’s about to change, according to Bloomberg (paywalled).

Starting in June, if users have Gemini or Claude installed on their phones, Siri will be able to use those bots instead, by recording their preferred «Extension» in Settings.

That would end the ChatGPT monopoly that OpenAI has enjoyed since 2024, and opens up the chatbot ecosystem to other players, likely staving off regulators.

Opening up the platform is for the system level Siri queries native to iOS itself, and must not be confused with the standalone Siri app, which will use Gemini in a billion dollar deal.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled), Gizmodo, Reuters, and MacRumors.

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.