Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Anthropic announced Thursday that it has added web search capability to its Claude chatbot. It’s not a new feature to the AI world—but the company’s approach stands as one the most thoughtful to date. Much like its rival Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude works relevant information from the web into a conversational answer, and includes clickable source citations. Web search is available as a “feature preview” for U.S. users of the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, with plans to expand to the free tier and to more countries What sets Anthropic’s web search feature apart is that it is automatic. Rather than requiring users to manually select a web search on a given query …

Can a headline-making squabble with a client actually be good for a brand? This week’s dispute between the Department of Defense and Anthropic, a high-profile player in the super-competitive field of artificial intelligence, may be just that. The dispute involves whether the Pentagon, which has an agreement to use Anthropic technology, can apply it in a wider range of scenarios: all “lawful use” cases. Anthropic has resisted signing off on some potential scenarios, and the Pentagon has essentially accused it of being overly cautious. As it happens, that assessment basically aligns with Anthropic’s efforts (most recently via Super Bowl ads aimed squarely at prominent …

A public showdown between the The President administration and Anthropic is hitting an impasse as military officials demand the artificial intelligence company bend its ethical policies by Friday or risk damaging its business. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei drew a sharp red line 24 hours before the deadline, declaring his company “cannot in good conscience accede” to the Pentagon’s final demand to allow unrestricted use of its technology. Anthropic, maker of the chatbot Claude, can afford to lose a defense contract. But the ultimatum this week from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posed broader risks at the peak of the company’s meteoric rise from a little-known computer scie…

Forget about the big game on Sunday. Two heavyweights have been battling it out this week over a topic that’s become all-too-familiar over the years: advertising creep. It’s a tale as old as time, in some respects. Many a CEO have proudly declared that their company’s platform or services will remain ad-free, only to later succumb to the lure of all that advertising revenue and embrace it. And that’s creating a new divide among AI platforms—one that will play out to the world’s largest TV viewing audience during the Super Bowl. Among the nearly dozen AI-related ads on Sunday will be two 60-second spots each for OpenAI and Anthropic. While OpenAI will use…

Anthropic Labs just announced a new product for its flagship AI model called Claude Design. According to Anthropic, the new tool “lets you collaborate with Claude to create polished visual work like designs, prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and more.” The company is billing the tool as a way for non-designers to mock up visuals, and a way for designers to quickly test out a range of initial prototypes. It’s powered by Claude’s most recent new model, Opus 4.7, which is trained to handle difficult coding prompts and complex, long-running tasks. Claude Design is available starting today to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise Subscribers. Anthropic joins a grow…

One of the world’s biggest AI startups might be eyeing a massive IPO. According to a new report in the Financial Times, Anthropic has tapped the Palo Alto-based law firm Wilson Sonsini to help the company go public as soon as early next year. The law firm has a deep well of experience shepherding major tech IPOs and has worked with Google, LinkedIn, Lyft, and Square on their public offerings. In the lead-up to a potential IPO, the Financial Times reports that the company is drumming up a private round of funding that would peg its value at over $300 billion. According to the report, the company is also discussing its plans with large investment banks, but those ta…

Here is a number worth sitting with: 295%. That’s how much U.S. app uninstalls of ChatGPT surged in a single day last month, after OpenAI struck a deal with the Department of Defense that its rival Anthropic had publicly refused to sign. In the same 24-hour window, Claude’s downloads jumped 51%. By that evening, Anthropic’s app had climbed to No. 1 on the U.S. App Store, leapfrogging 20 apps in under a week. One values-driven decision. One weekend. A measurable transfer of market share. Most of the coverage framed this as a political story. It isn’t. Or at least, not only. It’s also a brand loyalty story. And it tells us something important about the category …

In a new report, AI company Anthropic detailed a “highly sophisticated espionage campaign” that deployed its artificial intelligence tools to launch automated cyberattacks around the globe. The attackers aimed high, targeting government agencies, Big Tech companies, banks, and chemical companies, and succeeded in “a small number of cases,” according to Anthropic. The company says that its research links the hacking operation to the Chinese government. The company claims that the findings are a watershed moment for the industry, marking the first instance of a cyber espionage scheme carried out by AI. “We believe this is the first documented case of a large-scale…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Anthropic uses the Super Bowl to land some zingers about the future of AI Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads are bangers. The spots, which Anthropic posted on X on Wednesday, seize on rival OpenAI’s plans to begin injecting ads into its ChatGPT chatbot for free-tier users as soon as this month. The 30-second ads dramatize what the real effects of that decision might look like for users. They never mention OpenAI or ChatGPT by name. In one ad, a human fitness instructor playing the role…

Anthropic said Tuesday that it is sharing a preview version of its upcoming AI model in a new cybersecurity initiative with a coalition of tech companies to find and fix vulnerabilities in critical software infrastructure. The Project Glasswing initiative includes tech stalwarts like Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, and Palo Alto Networks. Anthropic said the partners will use the model for defensive security work and distribute their findings within the industry at large. The company is also extending access to roughly 40 additional organizations that build or maintain critical software infrastructure. Fears have been …

Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In. For years, progress in AI has been motivated by an industry-wide yen to create software that’s at least as capable as humans—not at some tasks, but all of them. The precise definition of the goal varies, and two maddeningly overlapping terms, artificial general intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence, both get bandied around. But no matter how you look at the aspiration (or how long you think it will take to achieve), it’s about the ways the world will change when software can do everything extraordinarily well. I’ve written—here and here—about why I believe fixating on that eventuality isn’t the best wa…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. Anthropic’s stance on autonomous weapons may not survive the future Much of the AI world is watching closely as Anthropic tangles with the Pentagon over how the government can use the Claude models. Anthropic has a $200 million contract with the Pentagon, but the contract says the military can’t use the AI company’s models as the brains for autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance of Americans. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insists, after the fact, that the military should be a…

What if the chatbots we talk to every day actually felt something? What if the systems writing essays, solving problems, and planning tasks had preferences, or even something resembling suffering? And what will happen if we ignore these possibilities? Those are the questions Kyle Fish is wrestling with as Anthropic’s first in-house AI welfare researcher. His mandate is both audacious and straightforward: Determine whether models like Claude can have conscious experiences, and, if so, how the company should respond. “We’re not confident that there is anything concrete here to be worried about, especially at the moment,” Fish says, “but it does seem possible.” Earlier …

Anthropic released on Monday its Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, which it says returns results faster and can show the user the “chain of thought” it follows to reach an answer. This latest model also powers a new coding tool called Claude Code that can perform some development tasks autonomously. Claude 3.7 Sonnet offers an “extended thinking” mode that engages in a more detailed “chain of thought” reasoning but takes longer to generate a response. For simpler questions it eschews this mode and instead focuses on speed. Other models offer their own versions of “thinking” mode, but typically the user has to select that feature for harder problems; Anthropic says Claude 3.7 …

Anthropic is out with a new model called Claude Opus 4.6, an upgrade to its top-of-the-line Opus 4.5 model that launched in November. The new release could add new capabilities to Anthropic’s Claude Code coding assistant, which is facing growing competitive pressure from OpenAI’s Codex. Anthropic says Opus 4.6 improves on its predecessor’s coding skills, planning, and, perhaps most importantly, its ability to reason more clearly when handling large amounts of information. When Opus 4.6 powers Claude Code, the coding agent can comprehend larger codebases and make more thoughtful decisions about how and where to add new code, the company says. More long-term memory …

When you think of an operating system, you probably think of interfaces to open, workflows to follow, screens to move through. Work has always lived inside those boundaries. At Anthropic, that logic is starting to break. The company is reorganizing itself around a simple, destabilizing premise: work no longer needs a fixed system to run through. Anthropic says employees now rely on Claude, its flagship AI model, along with its products Code and Cowork, for most of their day-to-day work. The model is starting to function as an “internal operating system.” What once required navigating multiple systems, stitching together data, and coordinating across teams now begins w…

Anthropic is making hay while the sun shines. The AI company’s high-stakes dispute with the Pentagon—in which it refused to allow its product to be used for autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance—generated intense mainstream media coverage and a wave of public support, including from many within the artificial intelligence community. Claude rose to No. 1 in the Apple App Store’s free app rankings on Sunday, February 28, and on Tuesday, March 3, it hit No. 1 in a similar ranking for the Google Play store. The government is effectively banning the use of Anthropic models and tools within government agencies and their suppliers, and has labeled Anthropic…

The dispute between Anthropic and the Department of Defense is quickly becoming a broader test of how far the government can go in policing AI companies’ policies—and how much support those companies can rally from the wider research community. A fair showing of top AI researchers had already signed a public letter backing Anthropic. Now 37 of them have taken a more formal step, signing an amicus brief filed with the court Monday. The filing underscores how the clash is evolving from a narrow contract dispute into something bigger: a test of whether the government can effectively blacklist an American AI company for setting limits on how its technology is used. Th…

It’s official: AOL‘s dial-up internet has taken its last bow. AOL previously confirmed it would be pulling the plug on Tuesday (Sept. 30) — writing in a brief update on its support site last month that it “routinely evaluates” its offerings and had decided to discontinue dial-up, as well as associated software “optimized for older operating systems,” from its plans. Dial-up is now no longer advertised on AOL’s website. As of Wednesday, former company help pages like “connect to the internet with AOL Dialer” appeared unavailable — and nostalgic social media users took to the internet to say their final goodbyes. AOL, formerly America Online, introduced many hou…

Launched 16 years ago with only 500 apps, Apple’s App Store revolutionized how we interact with our devices. As of 2023, the App Store had nearly 1.8 million apps, spanning categories like gaming, fitness, productivity, social media, and much more. The phrase “There’s an app for that” has never been more true. But with so many apps available, users face a new challenge: app fatigue. With millions of choices, users can easily become overwhelmed. Even when someone chooses to download an app, they can be bombarded with notifications urging them to engage, upgrade, or subscribe. With many apps competing for users’ attention and wallets, this can push them to ignore or eve…