Confer is one of the most interesting ChatGPT alternatives because it's attempting to deliver a fully privacy-focused AI chatbot experience. In that, instead of having every prompt, search, and input used to train AI and build a personal profile on you, Confer aims to protect your privacy instead.
An estimated two thousand Bay Area residents flocked to San Francisco on Sunday, Jan. 18 to celebrate the life of Claude, the California Academy of Sciences' iconic albino alligator. Claude died last month at 30 years old after he was diagnosed with liver cancer. "[Claude] was a steady presence, teaching my children without words about curiosity, about respect for living things and about the joy of simply observing the world as it is," California State Assemblymember Catherine Stefani noted from the stage. "In a city full of icons, Claude became one of the most beloved without ever seeking the spotlight."
Anthropic has been building out support for third-party apps inside of Claude. As of today, the chatbot can now connect to platforms like Slack and Canva, fetching up files from inside those apps or performing tasks within them on a user's behalf. For instance, when connected to Box, Claude can now search for files, preview documents inline and answer questions about the content in front of you.
Claude will also form the core of Snowflake Intelligence, the data platform's enterprise intelligence agent. The two companies have collaborated before, with thousands of Snowflake customers processing trillions of Claude tokens monthly through Snowflake Cortex AI. The previous integration brought Claude to Snowflake's AI Data Cloud, but this new phase goes further. The focus is now on implementing advanced AI agents capable of multi-step analysis.
Anthropic says the goal is "complete transparency." Users will be able to clearly see what Claude remembers rather than "vague summaries," it said. Specific memories can also be toggled on and off or edited with natural conversation. For example, you could tell Claude to focus on specific memories or "forget an old job entirely." Users can also create "distinct memory spaces" that will keep various memories apart.
Design-to-code translation (quick prototypes) Once you craft a high-fidelity mockup, you need to turn it into code. Previously, you have either to wait for developers to do it or learn how to code and do it yourself. Nowadays you can simply send your design to Claude and it will code it. I typically use Claude to generate an HTML + TailwindCSS prototype from UI specifications or UI screenshots. Here is how it works. You attach a screenshot of the UI you want to craft and let Claude do the heavy lifting for you.
Claude will now connect with Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive to search and analyze documents without you needing to upload them manually. The Microsoft 365 connector is available now for all Claude Team and Enterprise plan users, but administrators need to enable the integration before end users can connect up their accounts. The Microsoft Outlook integration with Claude lets the chatbot access email threads and analyze communications to surface relevant context in its answers.
ChatGPT, for example, came back with what felt like a movie script. Tunis started with a sunrise walk through Sidi Bou Saïd, pastries and mint tea in hand, followed by a whirlwind through the Medina and a dramatic half-day at the ruins of Carthage. Then, in Tozeur, it pulled the cinematic card with "Star Wars" filming sets in the desert, and camel rides across dunes at sunset.
Tech behemoth IBM is teaming up with AI research lab Anthropic to bring AI into its software. Armonk, New York-based IBM announced it will be adding Anthropic's Claude large language model family into some of its software products on Tuesday. The first product to tap Claude will be IBM's integrated development environment, which is already available to a select group of customers.
"Agentic AI systems are being weaponized." That's one of the first lines of Anthropic's new Threat Intelligence report, out today, which details the wide range of cases in which Claude - and likely many other leading AI agents and chatbots - are being abused. First up: "Vibe-hacking." One sophisticated cybercrime ring that Anthropic says it recently disrupted used Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent, to extort data from at least 17 different organizations around the world within one month.
"The OpenAI rival spent 'many millions of dollars' buying used print books, which the company or its vendors then stripped of their bindings, cut the pages, and scanned into digital files."
