Claude is a series of large language models developed by the American software company Anthropic. The first version was released as an AI-based chatbot in March 2023, marking the public debut of the Claude model family. Anthropic designed Claude with a focus on safety and ethical alignment, using a technique it developed called a constitution, which guides the model's behavior through a set of principles. The launch positioned Claude as a direct competitor in the rapidly expanding field of generative artificial intelligence, alongside offerings from OpenAI and other firms.
Since its initial release, Claude has evolved through multiple generations. Beginning with Claude 3, each generation has typically been offered in three sizes: Haiku (the least capable), Sonnet, and Opus (the most capable). In 2026, Anthropic introduced an additional model named Claude Mythos, released to a limited set of companies and organizations, followed by Claude Fable, a version of Mythos with stricter safeguards, made available to the general public. The family also expanded beyond the core chatbot to include agentic tools for software development and other tasks.
Constitutional AI and Safety Approach
A defining feature of Claude is its training using a constitution, a method developed by Anthropic to improve ethical and legal compliance. This approach involves specifying a set of principles that the model is trained to follow, rather than relying solely on human feedback. The constitution covers topics such as helpfulness, honesty, and avoidance of harmful content. This emphasis on safety was central to Claude's launch narrative and distinguished it from many other large language models that prioritized raw capability.
Anthropic's safety focus extended to the model's deployment. The company implemented measures to reduce the likelihood of generating biased, toxic, or dangerous outputs. This constitutional approach also influenced later developments, including the release of Claude Fable in 2026, which incorporated stricter safeguards compared to the earlier Mythos model.
Claude Chatbot and Subscription Services
Claude is primarily accessed as a generative AI chatbot. In June 2024, Anthropic introduced artifacts, a feature that allows the model to generate and interact with code snippets and documents. A web search feature was added in 2025, enabling the chatbot to retrieve up-to-date information from the internet.
Subscription services provide enhanced access to Claude models. Claude Pro and Claude Max are paid tiers, with Max offering higher usage limits at an additional cost. Grouped subscriptions include Claude Team and Claude Enterprise, designed for organizational use. According to card-spend data from Ramp, the share of businesses on its platform paying for Anthropic products rose 4.9 percentage points in February 2026, reaching 24.4%, the largest monthly gain Ramp had recorded for the company.
Chat Sharing and Privacy Incidents
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 instances, 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.
Application Programming Interface
Claude is also provided through an application programming interface (API), allowing developers to integrate the model into their own applications. In October 2024, Anthropic introduced the "computer use" feature, 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 capability expanded Claude's utility beyond text generation into interactive automation.
Claude Code
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. 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. 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% of its espionage cyberattacks against 30 organizations.
Claude Code is used by Microsoft, Google, and was used by OpenAI employees until August 2025, when Anthropic revoked OpenAI's API access, calling it "a direct violation of our 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. 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.
Claude in Chrome and Cowork
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% of the time after mitigations. It became generally available in August 2026.
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, such as organizing files on a user's computer or generating documents from material in a local folder. 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, such as web browsers or spreadsheet applications, to carry out tasks. According to developers, Cowork was mostly built by Claude Code. In August 2026, Cowork was made available in a sidebar of the Chrome browser.
Claude Design
Claude Design is a tool released by Anthropic, extending the Claude family into creative and design-oriented applications. While details about its full capabilities were limited at the time of launch, it represents Anthropic's continued expansion of Claude beyond text and code into multimodal and visual domains.
Regulatory and Legal Challenges
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. This episode highlighted the tensions between Anthropic's stated safety principles and government procurement demands, and it became a significant case in the broader debate over AI governance and corporate responsibility.