Anthropic, one of the world’s best-funded generative AI startups with $7.6 billion in capital, is launching a new paid plan aimed at companies, including those in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, finance and legal.
The plan, called “Team,” provides customers with higher priority access to Anthropic’s Claude 3 family of generative AI models, as well as additional administrative and user management controls.
“Anthropic “We’ve launched the Team plan now in response to growing demand from enterprise customers looking to deploy Claude’s advanced AI capabilities in their businesses,” Scott White, head of product at Anthropic, told TechCrunch. “The Team plan is designed for companies of all sizes and industries that want to give their employees access to Claude’s language understanding and production capabilities in a controlled and trusted environment.”
The Teams plan – which complements Anthropic’s individual premium Pro plan – offers “greater usage per user” compared to the Pro, allowing users to “significantly increase” the number of chats they can have with Claude. (We asked Anthropic for the numbers.) Team customers get a contextual window with 200,000 tokens (~150,000 words), as well as all the benefits of Pro, such as: B. early access to new features.
Photo credit: Anthropocene
Context window or context refers to input data (e.g. text) that a model considers before generating output (e.g. more text). Models with small context windows tend to forget the content of even very recent conversations, while models with larger contexts avoid this danger – and as an added benefit, better capture the flow of data they ingest.
Team also brings new switches to control billing and user management. And in the coming weeks, it will gain collaboration features including citations to verify AI-generated claims (models like Anthropic’s are prone to hallucinations), integrations with data repositories like codebases and customer relationship management platforms (e.g. Salesforce), and – what Perhaps most intriguing is This Author – a canvas for working with team members on AI-generated documents and projects, says Anthropic.
In the short term, Team customers will be able to take advantage of tool usage features for Claude 3, which recently entered open beta. This allows users to equip Claude 3 with custom tools to perform a wider range of tasks, such as: B. to get the current share price of a company or the local weather report, similar to OpenAI’s GPTs.
“By enabling organizations to deeply integrate Claude into their collaborative workflows, Team Plan enables Anthropic to capture significant enterprise market share as more companies move from AI experimentation to full-scale deployment to achieve transformative business results,” said White . “In 2023, customers quickly experimented with AI, and now in 2024 the focus has shifted to identifying and scaling applications that deliver tangible business value.”
Anthropic says it’s a big project, but it could require significant effort on its part to get companies on board.
According to a recent Gartner survey, 49% of companies said it is difficult to assess and prove the value of AI projects, making them difficult to sell internally. A separate McKinsey survey found that 66% of executives believe generative AI is years away from delivering substantial business results.
Photo credit: Anthropocene
Still, corporate spending on generative AI is expected to be enormous. IDC expects it to reach $15.1 billion in 2027, an increase of nearly eight times over the 2023 total.
This is likely because generative AI providers, most notably OpenAI, are increasing their enterprise-focused efforts.
OpenAI recently announced that more than 600,000 users have signed up for the enterprise level of its ChatGPT generative AI platform, ChatGPT Enterprise. It also introduced numerous tools aimed at meeting enterprise compliance and governance needs, such as a new user interface for comparing model performance and quality.
Anthropic offers its Team plan at competitive prices: $30 per user per month, billed monthly, with a minimum of five seats. OpenAI does not publish the price of ChatGPT Enterprise, but users on Reddit report that prices range from $30 per user per month for 120 users to $60 per user per month for 250 users.
“Anthropic’s Team plan is competitive and affordable considering the value it offers businesses,” White said. “The per-user model is straightforward and allows companies to start small and expand gradually. This structure supports Anthropic’s growth and stability while enabling companies to use AI strategically.”
It certainly helps that Anthropic’s launch team is starting from a position of strength.
Amazon completed its $4 billion investment in Anthropic in March (following a $2 billion investment from Google), and the company is reportedly on track to exceed annual revenue by the end of 2024 to generate $850 – a 70% increase over a previous forecast. Anthropic could view Team as its logical next path to expansion. But at least for now, it seems that Anthropic can afford to let Team grow organically while it tries to convince reluctant companies that its generative AI is better than the rest.
An anthropic iOS app
The other news from Anthropic on Wednesday is the launch of an iOS app. Given that the company has been conspicuously hiring iOS engineers in recent months, this isn’t a huge surprise.
The iOS app provides access to Claude 3, including free access as well as upgraded Pro and Team access. It syncs with the Anthropic client on the web and leverages Claude 3’s vision capabilities to offer real-time analysis for uploaded and saved images. For example, users can upload a screenshot of charts from a presentation and ask Claude to summarize them.
Photo credit: Anthropocene
“By offering the same features as the web version, including chat history synchronization and the ability to upload photos, the iOS app aims to make Claude a convenient and integrated part of users’ daily lives, both for personal and also for professional use,” said White. “It complements the web interface and API offerings and gives users another way to interact with the AI assistant. As we continue to develop and refine our technologies, we will continue to look for new ways to deliver value to users across different platforms and use cases, including mobile app development and functionality.”