Anthropic Claude goes pro

Anthropic announced on Wednesday the release of its new Claude Enterprise subscription, the company’s first major new release since the chatbots’s 2023 debut. Designed for businesses looking to more deeply integrate with the AI systems, the new product will compete directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise service.

As Claude Teams helps small businesses more efficiently utilize their data, Claude Enterprise will enable businesses to upload their company files securely to the AI’s cloud, then utilize Claude to analyze that data, act as a fine-tuned, in-company AI assistant, and answer questions about it or generate images and graphs. GitLab, Midjourney, North Highland Consulting, Menlo Ventures, and Sourcegraph all helped beta test the new service and have reportedly subscribed to Claude Enterprise as well.

″[We’re] moving to a world where these models will behave much more like virtual collaborators than virtual assistants,” Scott White, a product manager at Anthropic, told CNBC. However, White does concede that Claude Enterprise has been a long time coming.

“The reality is that Claude has been usable for companies for a year. Candidly, we’ve had a product in the market for a lot less long,” White told TechCrunch in a separate interview. “But we’re responding to the needs of our customers at a high velocity with a smaller team.”

While it’s a bit late to the game, Claude Enterprise does offer a 500,000 token context window — enough to upload as much as 200,000 lines of code, thousands of pages of documents, or a two-hour audio transcription — which is more than double what other frontier models like ChatGPT Enterprise can offer.

The new subscription also offers increased rate limits and access to both Projects and Artifacts. It can be integrated into GitHub, so businesses can easily upload their codebases and GitHub repositories to Claude, as well as an “activity feed” where employees more familiar with AI can show those not as well-versed how to effectively put the AI to work.

The company has committed to not train its models on customer data. And though Anthropic has not yet disclosed how much the plan will actually cost, White revealed to TechCrunch that it will be more expensive than the $30/month Teams plan.