Anthropic Unveils the Original "Claude": A New AI Assistant to Rival ChatGPT

On March 14, 2023, Anthropic announced its AI assistant “Claude.” Coming just a few months after ChatGPT’s debut the previous November, this was, in effect, the real debut product of Anthropic — a company built around the principle of being “helpful, honest, and harmless.”

Details

• Two models offered: A high-performance “Claude” and a faster, lower-cost “Claude Instant” were offered simultaneously, letting users choose based on their needs — a pattern that became the basic template for the Claude lineup going forward
• Early launch partners: Notion (Notion AI), Quora (the Poe app), DuckDuckGo (DuckAssist), Robin AI (contract analysis), and AssemblyAI (speech transcription) had all integrated Claude by launch
• Strengths: Anthropic touted summarization, search, creative co-writing, Q&A, and coding as strengths. Early users praised the model for being less prone to harmful output, easy to converse with, and highly “steerable”
• Availability: Offered through both a chat interface and a developer API, following an earlier closed alpha limited to select partners

What happened next

This original Claude laid the groundwork for the publicly available beta “Claude 2” that same July, and the “Claude 3” family that arrived in 2024 — a rapid succession of model refreshes. It marked the first step in establishing Anthropic as a serious rival in a conversational AI market that had, until then, seemed dominated by ChatGPT alone.