Anthropic launches Claude publicly with two model tiers after closed alpha
Anthropic announced the public launch of Claude on March 14, 2023, following a closed alpha with partners including Notion, Quora, and DuckDuckGo. The release introduced two model variants — Claude (high-performance) and Claude Instant (lighter and faster) — accessible via chat interface and API. Early partners reported Claude produced fewer harmful outputs and was more steerable than competing models, with deployments spanning education, legal tech, productivity, and search.
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Anthropic launches Claude 2 with 100K context window and improved coding, reasoning, and safety
Anthropic released Claude 2, featuring a 100K token context window, improved performance on coding (71.2% on Codex HumanEval, up from 56.0%), math (88.0% on GSM8k), and legal reasoning (76.5% on the Bar exam multiple choice section). The model is available via API at the same price as Claude 1.3 and through a new public beta at claude.ai for US and UK users. Safety improvements include a 2x reduction in harmful outputs on internal red-team evaluations compared to Claude 1.3. Early API partners include Jasper and Sourcegraph.
Anthropic launches Claude 3 model family: Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus
Anthropic announced the Claude 3 model family on March 4, 2024, comprising three models — Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus — in ascending capability order. Claude 3 Opus claims top performance on major benchmarks including MMLU, GPQA, and GSM8K, with near-perfect recall on long-context evaluations (200K context window, 99%+ NIAH accuracy) and new multimodal vision capabilities. The release also highlights reduced unnecessary refusals, a twofold accuracy improvement over Claude 2.1, and Constitutional AI-based safety tuning. Opus and Sonnet launched immediately via claude.ai and the Claude API across 159 countries, with Haiku to follow.
Anthropic launches Claude in Canada with full product suite
Anthropic expanded Claude's availability to Canada as of June 5, 2024, offering access to Claude.ai, the iOS app, the API, and the Team plan. Canadian users can subscribe to Claude Pro at CA$28/month for access to the Claude 3 model family (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku) with 5x usage limits. The expansion is a geographic rollout with no new technical capabilities announced.
Anthropic introduces computer use capability, upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku
Anthropic announced three major developments: an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet with significant coding improvements (SWE-bench Verified rising from 33.4% to 49.0%, surpassing all publicly available models including reasoning models), a new Claude 3.5 Haiku that matches Claude 3 Opus performance at Haiku-tier speed, and a public beta of 'computer use' — a capability allowing Claude to control computers by viewing screens, moving cursors, clicking, and typing. Computer use is available via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI, with early adopters including Replit, The Browser Company, and Cognition. Both safety institutes (US AISI and UK AISI) conducted pre-deployment testing, and the model was assessed as remaining within ASL-2 under Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy.
Introducing Claude 3.5 Sonnet
Anthropic launches Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the first model in its Claude 3.5 family, claiming it outperforms Claude 3 Opus and competitor models on GPQA, MMLU, and HumanEval benchmarks while operating at twice the speed and mid-tier pricing ($3/$15 per million tokens). The model features a 200K context window, improved vision capabilities, and an internal agentic coding evaluation score of 64% versus 38% for Opus. Alongside the model, Anthropic introduces Artifacts on Claude.ai, a dedicated workspace for real-time editing of AI-generated content. The model was pre-deployment evaluated by the UK AI Safety Institute and assessed at ASL-2.
Anthropic releases Claude Instant 1.2 with improved math, coding, and safety
Anthropic released Claude Instant 1.2, an updated version of its faster, lower-cost model tier, now available via API. The release incorporates capabilities from Claude 2 and shows measurable benchmark gains: 58.7% on Codex (vs 52.8% for 1.1) and 86.7% on GSM8K (vs 80.9% for 1.1). Safety improvements include reduced hallucination and greater jailbreak resistance as measured by automated red-teaming.
Anthropic Launches Claude for Financial Services with Claude 4 Models and Ecosystem Integrations
Anthropic has introduced a Financial Analysis Solution targeting finance professionals, built around Claude 4 models and pre-built MCP connectors to data providers including FactSet, S&P Global, PitchBook, Databricks, and Snowflake. Claude Opus 4 reportedly passed 5 of 7 levels of the Financial Modeling World Cup and scored 83% accuracy on complex Excel tasks when deployed by FundamentalLabs. The solution includes Claude Code with expanded usage limits, expert implementation support, and partnerships with major consultancies including Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC. Early adopters include Bridgewater's AIA Labs, which has used Claude since 2023 for investment analyst workflows.
Anthropic launches Claude.ai, iOS app, and Team plan in Europe
Anthropic has made Claude available to European users and businesses, including the Claude.ai web interface, iOS app, and Team plan, following the earlier EU launch of the Claude API. The rollout covers Claude 3 model family access with multilingual support for French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other European languages. Pricing is set at €18/month for Claude Pro and €28/user/month for the Team plan. This expands Anthropic's commercial footprint into a major regulated market.



