"Claude 2" Released: The Consumer Website claude.ai Makes Its Debut
On July 11, 2023, Anthropic announced its new model “Claude 2.” The bigger change here was not the model’s raw capabilities but how it was delivered: Claude, previously accessible only through the API or partner apps, was now available for the first time directly to general consumers via the beta of a dedicated website, “claude.ai” (initially limited to the US and UK).
Details
- claude.ai beta launch: The first official chat interface that ordinary consumers could use simply by signing up — a turning point where Anthropic’s models moved from being a “developer-facing API” to a “consumer-facing product”
- Performance gains: Scores rose from 73.0% to 76.5% on a simulated bar exam, from 56.0% to 71.2% on coding (HumanEval), and from 85.2% to 88.0% on math (GSM8k). On the GRE’s reading and writing sections, it scored in the top 10%
- 100,000-token context window: Could read up to 100,000 tokens in a single prompt, enough to process hundreds of pages or an entire book, and could also generate outputs spanning several thousand tokens
- Safety: Anthropic said internal red-team evaluations showed a “twofold” reduction in harmful output compared to the previous version
- Pricing: API pricing remained unchanged from Claude 1.3, with early integrations from companies like Jasper and Sourcegraph
What happened next
The public launch of claude.ai marked a turning point in Anthropic’s evolution from a developer-focused company into one serving consumer products as well. This direction fed into the “Claude 3” family in 2024, and the expansion of free and Pro subscription plans that followed.