What is Claude?
Claude (currently Claude 3.5 Sonnet / Claude 3 Opus) is Anthropic's answer to ChatGPT, and in many ways it punches above its weight. The thing most users notice first is the writing quality — Claude has a more natural, less formulaic tone than many other AI assistants. It also has one of the largest context windows available, meaning you can feed it entire books, legal contracts, or long reports for analysis. The free plan is genuinely generous. Claude Pro at $20/month unlocks Claude 3 Opus, priority access, and higher usage limits. It integrates with tools like Slack, and its 'Projects' feature lets you build persistent workflows.
Pros & Cons
What works well
- Exceptional writing quality — reads more 'human'
- Huge 200k token context window
- Strong at summarising long documents
- Safety-conscious design reduces harmful outputs
- Good at following nuanced instructions
Things to know
- No image generation capability
- Weaker than GPT-4o on complex math
- Occasionally over-cautious on sensitive topics
What people use Claude for
- Analysing long documents and contracts
- Long-form writing and editing
- Research summarisation
- Creative writing
- Customer support automation