Anthropic wants its AI assistant Claude to be your favorite coworker

Anthropic has upgraded its Claude generative AI assistant to be more useful in the office. Claude Pro and Claude Team subscribers can now better organize and track their work with the AI assistant thanks to the new Projects and Artifacts features.

Projects are both a place for storing and interacting with data for tasks. Users can upload all their documents, code, and other relevant data into one place. Each project within Claude.ai includes a 200K context window, equivalent to a 500-page book. They can then ask Claude about it, and even set up custom instructions for how to respond in terms of tone or the context of who is asking and what they might need. The idea is to avoid what Anthropic calls “cold starts,” where users must start from scratch each time they engage with the AI assistant. By having a knowledge base to draw from, Claude can respond to queries more quickly and accurately.

Office Artifacts

The Artifacts feature is a kind of flip of the Projects in that it can produce a wide range of content the way Projects can store them. Users can ask Claude to make text, code, and other ‘artifacts.’ Claude will share the output in a dedicated window alongside the chat, like a preview window of what it’s composing. This setup enables users to see and interact with the generated content in real time, providing immediate feedback and adjustments where needed. An additional upgrade lets users share the best bits of conversations with Claude with their team in a shared project activity feed.

Both Projects and Artifacts are powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Anthropic’s latest AI model. According to the company, Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperforms recently announced models like GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 1.5 on a variety of benchmarks.

“Our vision for Claude has always been to create AI systems that work alongside people and meaningfully enhance their workflows,” Anthropic explained in a blog post. “With this new functionality, Claude can enable idea generation, more strategic decision-making, and exceptional results.”