Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, an American AI research company founded in 2021. The system responds to instructions in Dutch and is useful for writing, analysis, research and programming. Claude is considered one of the serious alternatives to ChatGPT, with a different approach in terms of security and reliability.
What is Anthropic and who created Claude?
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, along with a number of former OpenAI researchers. Dario was previously VP of Research at OpenAI, Daniela was head of security and policy. That background explains why Anthropic has secure AI development as its core mission.
The company focuses on developing reliable, interpretable and steerable AI systems. That focus distinguishes Anthropic from parties that primarily focus on speed and feature expansion. If you want to understand how Claude compares to other major AI models, our article on the different types of AI a good starting point.
How does Claude AI work?
Claude is a large language model built on the transformer architecture, similar to ChatGPT and Gemini. The system is trained on large amounts of text and refined via a method Anthropic calls “Constitutional AI” (CAI).
With Constitutional AI, the model is given explicit principles on which it evaluates and adjusts its own responses. As a result, Claude also learns from AI-generated feedback based on those principles, in addition to the usual human feedback. In practice, this yields more consistent and predictable answers, with less chance of harmful or misleading output.
A practical advantage of Claude is its large context window. You can enter extensive documents, long e-mail threads or voluminous reports and Claude handles the full context when generating a response. This makes it suitable for document analysis and tasks where a lot of background is relevant.
What are the key Claude AI features?
Claude is useful for writing and editing texts, summarising documents, answering questions, analysing data, writing and explaining code, and translating between languages. The combination of text comprehension and coding skills makes it useful for a variety of professional tasks.
One specific feature is Artifacts, introduced in 2024. With it, you can edit documents and generate and test code snippets directly within Claude, without leaving the interface. Practical for professionals who combine writing and technical tasks.
Claude is also available via API for organisations looking to integrate it into existing systems or workflows. An overview of the available models and their differences can be found in our article on the Claude versions.
What are the privacy and security benefits of Claude?
Anthropic states that Claude is not trained based on user data, even in the free version. The exceptions are situations where a conversation is assessed for policy compliance, where you provide your own feedback via the thumbs-up or thumbs-down function, or where you give explicit permission.
Anthropic has indicated that Claude does not include ads and does not plan to change that. For organisations handling sensitive information, this could be a relevant factor when choosing between different AI tools. You can read more about how AI systems handle data in our article on the risks of AI.
What is the difference between Claude AI and ChatGPT?
Both systems are large language models with similar basic functions. Professionals already working with ChatGPT notice that Claude is stronger for document-intensive tasks because of its larger context window: you can enter more text at once without reducing the quality of the answer.
ChatGPT has a more extensive ecosystem of integrations and has been more widely adopted as a consumer product. Claude scores on consistency in tone and on tasks involving long, structured texts. Which model fits best depends on your specific work.
Want to learn to use both models professionally? LearnLLM offers both a ChatGPT course as a Claude AI course aimed at practical use in your field.
Who is Claude AI suitable for?
Claude is particularly strong for professionals who regularly work with long documents, extensive reports or complex texts that need careful analysis. Its large context window and focus on consistent output make it suitable for tasks where accuracy outweighs speed.
For organisations with strict privacy and reliability requirements, Anthropic's approach offers a recognisable alternative to ChatGPT. Claude is available as a consumer product and via its API for business integrations.
Want to understand how closed models like Claude and ChatGPT compare with open source alternatives? Our article on open source versus closed AI helps you make that trade-off.
