#anthropic

#anthropic

AI labs just can't get their employees to stay put. Yesterday's big AI news was the abrupt and seemingly acrimonious departure of three top executives at Mira Murati's Thinking Machines lab. All three were quickly snapped up by OpenAI, and now it seems they won't be the last to leave. Alex Heath is reporting that two more employees are expected to leave for OpenAI in the next few weeks.

This poor track record makes Anthropic's latest agent, Claude Cowork, a pleasant surprise. When I tested it by running it through some basic and intermediate demos the company suggested in addition to my own commands, it worked fairly well-especially for software that's still in beta. It can do things like organize files into folders, convert file types, generate reports, and even take over the browser to search the web or tidy up a Gmail inbox.

Last Wednesday, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Health, a dedicated health experience within ChatGPT that combines a user's personal health information with the company's AI with the promise of helping people better manage their health and wellness. The next day, the company launched OpenAI for Healthcare, which is a suite of AI tools designed to help healthcare providers reduce administrative burnout and improve care.

Anthropic has distinguished itself from competitors by staying laser-focused on its enterprise customers with offerings catered to make working professionals' lives easier. The Skills feature, launched in October, aimed to do just that, and now it has received an upgrade, making it easier for organizations to take advantage. With the Skills feature, users can provide Claude with a set of instructions, including resources like brand guidelines, so that the chatbot can reference them when performing specialized tasks autonomously.

What if the chatbots we talk to every day actually felt something? What if the systems writing essays, solving problems, and planning tasks had preferences, or even something resembling suffering? And what will happen if we ignore these possibilities? Those are the questions Kyle Fish is wrestling with as Anthropic's first in-house AI welfare researcher. His mandate is both audacious and straightforward: Determine whether models like Claude can have conscious experiences, and, if so, how the company should respond.

The Anthropic CEO spent a good chunk of the interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin drawing a careful line between his company's approach and that of a certain competitor. When asked about whether the AI industry is in a bubble, Amodei separated the "technological side" from the "economic side" and then twisted the knife. "On the technological side, I feel really solid," he said.

On Monday, the company introduced Claude Opus 4.5 and described it as its most advanced AI model to date, and said that the new model "scored higher than any human candidate ever" on "a notoriously difficult take-home exam" that the company gives prospective engineering candidates. In a blog post on Monday, Anthropic said that the two-hour take-home test is designed to assess technical ability and judgment under time pressure, and though it doesn't reflect all skills an engineer needs to possess,

On Monday, Anthropic announced Opus 4.5, the latest version of its flagship model. It's the last of Anthropic's 4.5 series of models to be released, following the launch of Sonnet 4.5 in September and Haiku 4.5 in October. As expected, the new version of Opus has state-of-the-art performance on a range of benchmarks, including coding benchmarks (SWE-Bench and Terminal-bench), tool use (tau2-bench and MCP Atlas) and general problem solving (ARC-AGI 2, GPQA Diamond).

How very "Here we go round the mulberry bush," right? Microsoft buys Anthropic's models; Anthropic runs Claude on Microsoft's Azure cloud; Anthropic buys Nvidia's chips; and both Microsoft and Nvidia invest in Anthropic. If that sounds like a big circle going round and round and back again... that's because it is. And honestly, it's making me dizzy.

This is all about deepening our commitment to bringing the best infrastructure, model choice and applications to our customers, Nadella said on a video call with the other two executives, adding that it builds on the critical partnership Microsoft still has with OpenAI.

"I think I'm deeply uncomfortable with these decisions being made by a few companies, by a few people," Amodei told Anderson Cooper in a "60 Minutes" episode that aired Sunday. "Like who elected you and Sam Altman?" asked Anderson. "No one. Honestly, no one," Amodei replied.

Anthropic is scrambling to assert its political neutrality as the Trump administration intensifies its campaign against so-called "woke AI," placing itself at the center of an increasingly ideological fight over how large language models should talk about politics. In a detailed post Thursday, Anthropic unveiled a sweeping effort to train its Claude chatbot to behave with what it calls "political even-handedness," a framework meant to ensure the model treats competing viewpoints "with equal depth, engagement, and quality of analysis."

We're getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren't possible before.

Google is in early discussions to deepen its investment in Anthropic, Business Insider has learned. The new round of funding could value Anthropic at more than $350 billion, according to one source familiar with the matter. The potential new deal, which is still being negotiated and is in flux, could also take the form of a strategic investment where Google provides additionalcloud computing servicesto Anthropic, a convertible note, or a priced funding round early next year, according to sources familiar with the matter.

In a statement, Anthropic said that Claude for Excel will allow users to "work directly with Claude in a sidebar in Microsoft Excel, where Claude can read, analyze, modify, and create new Excel workbooks." It promised that "Claude listens carefully, follows instructions precisely, and thinks through complex problems." More practically, it said Excel users will be able to ask the LLM about specific formulas or worksheets, with "cell-level citations so you can verify the logic."

Never mind Sam Altman's Stargate, which is just beginning to open its portal to distant AI-fueled worlds: Amazon's competing mountain of AI compute power is already up and running. Amazon Web Services today announced that Project Rainier, its Stargate-rivaling AI "UltraCluster", is now up and running, with "nearly half a million" Trainium2 chips serving the massive machine across multiple datacenters.

The idea of automating tasks for desktop users is not entirely novel. Last year in October, Anthropic became the first LLM provider to showcase the possibility of controlling a computer or some parts of its operating system. That ability, which Anthropic had termed "computer use," enabled developers to instruct Claude 3.5 Sonnet, through the Anthropic API, to read and interpret what's on the display, type text, move the cursor, click buttons, and switch between windows or applications.

Discussions are still in the early stages, but Google and Claude creator Anthropic are considering a cloud agreement worth tens of billions of dollars. This would allow Anthropic to use Google's AI computing power. Google, itself an investor in Anthropic, would already see a significant return on its investment under the agreement. It has invested approximately $3 billion in two investment rounds in the AI company.