Claude is a series of large language models (LLMs) developed by American software company Anthropic. The first version was released as an AI-based chatbot in March 2023, marking Anthropic's entry into the consumer-facing generative AI market. Claude is trained using a constitution, a technique developed by Anthropic to improve ethical and legal compliance, and has since expanded into multiple product lines including coding assistants and enterprise tools.
The Claude family has grown through several generations, with each major release typically offering three model sizes: Haiku (least capable), Sonnet (mid-tier), and Opus (most capable). The models are used both through direct chatbot interfaces and via an application programming interface (API) for developers. The name Claude reportedly honors Claude Shannon, the 20th-century mathematician who laid the foundation for information theory.
Initial Release and Funding Context
Anthropic released Claude in March 2023, following a period of substantial venture capital investment. The company had raised significant rounds in 2023, including a $450 million round and a $1.5 billion round, with major contributions from Google (AI) and Amazon Web Services. These investments helped fund the development of the initial Claude models and the infrastructure needed to deploy them at scale.
The launch positioned Anthropic as a direct competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT and other Generative AI chatbots. Unlike some rivals, Anthropic emphasized a safety-first approach, using constitutional AI techniques to align model behavior with ethical guidelines. This approach distinguished Claude in a rapidly crowded field of Large language model providers.
Product Evolution
The original Claude chatbot was followed by Anthropic Claude Instant, a faster and cheaper variant. In 2023, Anthropic released Claude 2, which improved reasoning and coding capabilities. The Anthropic Claude 3 Launch in 2024 introduced the Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus tiering that became standard for subsequent releases.
Claude Pro and Claude Max are subscription services providing additional access to Claude models, with Max offering higher usage limits at an additional cost. Grouped subscriptions include Claude Team and Claude Enterprise for organizational use. In 2025, Anthropic added a web search feature to Claude, allowing the chatbot to retrieve current information. A feature introduced in June 2024 allows Claude to generate and interact with code snippets and documents through artifacts.
Claude Code and Development Tools
Claude Code, released in February 2025, is an agentic command line tool that delegates coding tasks from the terminal using Natural language prompts. It was made generally available in May 2025 alongside Claude 4. Based on enterprise adoption, Anthropic reported a 5.5x increase in Claude Code revenue by July 2025. On October 20, 2025, Anthropic launched a web version of Claude Code and a sandboxing feature.
Coinciding with performance improvements tied to Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Code went viral during the 2025-2026 winter holidays when people had time to experiment with it, including many non-programmers who used it for Vibe coding. This surge in popularity helped establish Claude as a major tool in AI-assisted software development.
Claude Code is used by Microsoft (AI) and Google (AI), and was used by OpenAI employees until August 2025, when Anthropic revoked OpenAI's API access, calling it a direct violation of its terms of service. In February 2026, Anthropic introduced Claude Code Security, which reviews codebases to identify vulnerabilities. In March 2026, the source code for the Claude Code command-line interface application was leaked, revealing multiple upcoming features and models.
Security Incidents and Misuse
In August 2025, Anthropic reported that cybercriminals it designated GTG-2002 had used Claude Code in a data-extortion campaign against at least 17 organizations. In November 2025, Anthropic said that in September a China-based cybercrime group had used Claude Code to automate 80-90 percent of its espionage cyberattacks against 30 organizations.
In May 2026, Anthropic introduced Dreaming, a research-preview feature of its Managed Agents API that consolidates an agent's persistent memory between sessions by merging duplicates and removing stale entries. A memory consolidation feature called autoDream had been identified in the March source code leak.
Chat Sharing and Privacy Concerns
A Claude feature allows users to share chats with anyone who has the link. In September 2025, Forbes reported that hundreds of shared Claude chats had appeared in Google Search results, following similar incidents involving OpenAI's ChatGPT and xAI's Grok.
In July 2026, shared chats and Artifacts were again found to be indexed by Google. The BBC counted more than 200, some containing health records and corporate documents. The affected chats were those whose links had been posted on the public internet. Technical analysis suggested that a robots.txt rule blocking crawlers from shared-chat pages also prevented them from reading the noindex directive meant to keep the pages out of search results. Anthropic said the listings had been removed.
Computer Use and Browser Integration
In October 2024, the computer use feature was introduced, by which an application can call the Claude API to attempt to give navigational control of the application via Claude's interpretation of screen content and simulation of keyboard and mouse input. This represented a significant step toward agentic AI systems that can interact with software interfaces.
In August 2025, Anthropic released Claude for Chrome, a Google Chrome extension that lets Claude browse websites, click and fill forms on the user's behalf. It launched as a pilot for 1,000 Max subscribers. Anthropic said prompt-injection attacks succeeded 11.2 percent of the time after mitigations. It became generally available in August 2026.
Claude Cowork and Enterprise Expansion
claude-cowork is a tool similar to Claude Code but with a graphical user interface, aimed at non-technical users. It was released in January 2026 as a research preview. Cowork is available as a desktop application for Mac and Windows and through a web interface. It provides Claude with access to a sandboxed shell and to user-selected folders on the local file system, allowing the model to read, write and edit files, execute code, and chain multi-step tasks within a single conversation.
A Wall Street Journal reporter who tested the tool noted user concerns about granting an AI agent broad access to a personal computer. An early user reported that, after asking Cowork to organize the files on the desktop of his wife's computer, it deleted all the family photos requiring the restoration of the images from an iCloud backup.
In February 2026, Anthropic announced a wider enterprise release of Cowork, adding connectors for services such as Google Drive, Gmail, Docusign and FactSet, and customizable plugins for domains including financial analysis, engineering and human resources. The company described the update as a transition into an enterprise-grade product. In March 2026, Anthropic added Dispatch, which lets users send Cowork tasks from a phone to their computer, and allows Claude to operate programs on the user's computer. According to developers, Cowork was mostly built by Claude Code.
Later Models and Government Actions
In 2026, a more capable model named Claude Mythos was released to a handful of companies and organizations, followed by the release of claude-fable, a version of Mythos with stricter safeguards, to the general public. These releases continued Anthropic's pattern of offering increasingly capable models while attempting to balance capability with safety.
In February 2026, the United States Department of Defense designated Anthropic a supply chain risk and federal agencies were ordered to phase out Claude after the company refused to remove contractual prohibitions on using Claude for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. A federal judge blocked the designation in March 2026 and permanently set it aside in August 2026 as unconstitutional retaliation.