Anthropic, one of the world’s best-funded AI startups with $7.6 billion in the bank, is launching a new paid program aimed at businesses, including those in highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance and the legal ones, as well as a new app for iOS.
Team, the business plan, gives customers higher priority access to Anthropic’s Claude 3 family of AI models, as well as additional management and user management controls.
“Person now introduced the Team plan in response to growing demand from enterprise customers who want to deploy Claude’s advanced AI capabilities across their organizations,” Scott White, chief product officer at Anthropic, told TechCrunch. “The Team plan is designed for businesses 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 Team plan — which sits within Anthropic’s individual premium plan, Pro — offers “higher usage per user” compared to Pro, allowing users to “significantly increase” the number of conversations they can have with Claude. (We asked Anthropic for details.) Team customers receive 200,000-indication context window (~150,000 words), plus all the benefits of Pro, including early access to new features.
Image Credits: Humane
The context window, or context, refers to input data (eg text) that a model examines before generating output (eg more text). Models with small context windows tend to forget the content of even very recent conversations, while models with larger contexts avoid this pitfall — and, as an added bonus, better understand the flow of data they receive.
Team also brings with it new toggles for billing control and user management. And in the coming weeks, it will gain collaborative features, including referrals to verify AI-generated claims (models including Anthropic’s have hallucinations), integrations with data repos like codebases and customer relationship management platforms (e.g. Salesforce), and — perhaps most interesting to this author — a canvas to work with team members on AI-generated documents and projects, Anthropic says.
In the near future, the group’s customers will be able to leverage tool usage capabilities 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 getting a company’s current stock price or local weather report, similar to OpenAI’s GPTs.
“By enabling enterprises to deeply integrate Claude into their collaborative workflows, the Team plan positions Anthropic to capture significant market share as more companies move from AI experimentation to full-scale deployment in pursuit of transformative business outcomes,” said White. “In 2023, customers rapidly experimented with AI, and now in 2024, the focus has shifted to identifying and scaling applications that deliver concrete business value.”
Anthropic is talking a big game, but it may take significant effort on its part to get businesses on board.
According to a recent survey by Gartner, 49% of companies said that it is difficult to estimate and prove the value of AI projects, which makes them a difficult sell internally. A separate poll by McKinsey found this 66% of executives believe genetic AI is years away from generating meaningful business results.
Image Credits: Humane
However, enterprise spending on productive artificial intelligence is predicted to be huge. IDC expects it to reach $15.1 billion in 2027almost eightfold from the 2023 total.
This is likely to be the productive AI vendors, most notably OpenAI, stepping up their business-focused efforts.
OpenAI recently said it had more than 600,000 users signed up to the enterprise tier of its ChatGPT AI productivity platform, ChatGPT Enterprise. And it has introduced a range of tools aimed at meeting corporate compliance and governance requirements, such as a new user interface for benchmarking model performance and quality.
Anthropic prices its group plan competitively: $30 per user per month with a monthly fee, with a minimum of five posts. OpenAI does not publish the price of ChatGPT Enterprise, but users on Reddit report quoted anywhere 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 brings to organizations,” said White. “The per-user model is simple, allowing businesses to start small and scale incrementally. This structure supports Anthropic’s growth and stability while enabling businesses to strategically leverage AI.”
It definitely helps the team launching Anthropic from a position of strength.
Amazon completed its $4 billion investment in Anthropic in March (following Google’s $2 billion investment), and the company According to reports on track to generate more than $850 million in annual revenue by the end of 2024 — a 70% increase over a previous forecast. Anthropic may see Team as the logical next path for expansion. But at least for now it looks like Anthropic can afford to let the team grow organically as it tries to convince the businesses that hold its potential to be better than the rest.
An Anthropic iOS app
Anthropic’s other news on Wednesday is that it’s launching an iOS app. Since the company obviously has been hiring iOS engineers for the past few months, that’s not a big surprise.
The iOS app provides access to Claude 3, including free access as well as upgraded Pro and Team access. It syncs with Anthropic’s web client and leverages Claude 3’s vision capabilities to provide real-time analysis of uploaded and stored images. For example, users can upload a screenshot of charts from a presentation and ask Claude to summarize them.
Image Credits: Humane
“Offering the same functionality as the web version, including chat history synchronization and photo upload capabilities, the iOS app aims to make Claude a convenient and integrated part of users’ daily lives, both for personal and professional use,” said White. “It complements our web interface and API offerings, providing another avenue for users to interact with the AI assistant. As we continue to develop and refine our technologies, we will continue to explore new ways to deliver value to users across platforms and use cases, including mobile app development and functionality.”
