Anthropic Introduces Web Search for Claude Chatbot

Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude family of models, has added web search to its AI chatbot Claude, a long-missing feature now available in preview for paid users in the US. According to their blog, free users and more regions will gain access soon. 

Users can enable web search in the Claude web app’s settings, allowing the chatbot to pull information from the internet when needed. Currently, the feature works only with Anthropic’s latest model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

This update puts Claude on par with competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Mistral’s Le Chat, and xAI’s Grok. 

In a story by Verge, the challenges of AI search include combining probabilistic language models and web search, making accuracy unpredictable. Unlike deterministic systems, language models can vary in their responses, sometimes leading to serious errors.

Anthropic has also listed down use cases.

Claude’s web search helps sales teams follow industry trends, analysts find market data, researchers access sources and spot gaps, and shoppers compare products and prices.

The company also plans to release voice-based conversational features soon, the Financial Times reported. 

Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s CPO, said the company already has prototypes for the same and added that if Claude is autonomously operating a computer, the natural user interface is to speak to it. 

A few weeks ago, Anthropic announced a $3.5 billion Series E funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to $61.5 billion. The company also announced its newest Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, which earned widespread praise for its capabilities in tasks involving generating code.