Anthropic Launches ChatGPT Plus Rival Claude Pro

AI startup Anthropic introduced a paid version of its chatbot, Claude Pro. A ChatGPT Plus rival, the model is available to US and UK users and is $20/month (US) or £18/month (UK), the same price as ChatGPT’s paid version.

Anthropic will continue to provide free access to its chatbot. However, users of the free version will get less usage and experience longer wait times during high-traffic periods. Claude Pro users, on the other hand, will get up to five times more usage, including longer message and conversation lengths, and the ability to attach large files. Message limits for subscribers will reset every eight hours.

Like ChatGPT, Claude can generate text, analyze content, create summaries, and more. However, Claude offers a 100,000 token context window, meaning it can process approximately 75,000 words at once. ChatGPT, on the other hand, has a capacity of 8,000 tokens at a time. Tokens are word fragments that large language models use to process text.

Another advantage is that Claude can produce more up-to-date content as it’s trained on data up to December 2022 and may be aware of some early 2023 events. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is only aware of events that took place up to September 2021. Claude, however, is only available in the US and UK, while its popular counterpart supports use in over 160 countries worldwide.

Claude launched in March as a conversational bot “based on Anthropic’s research into training helpful, honest, and harmless AI systems.” Initially available to businesses and within the messaging app Slack and videotelephony software Zoom, Claude 2 became available for public use across the US and UK in July.

Increasingly concerned that ChatGPT creator OpenAI was taking an excessively commercial route that contradicted its initially non-profit nature, former OpenAI employees founded Anthropic in 2021.

Fast forward to 2023, Anthropic seems to be following OpenAI’s path as the popularity of its chatbot Claude grows. Namely, Microsoft has backed OpenAI with over $10 billion to date and in return, OpenAI has selected Microsoft as its exclusive cloud partner. Similarly, Anthropic has chosen Microsoft’s rival Google as its preferred cloud provider after the tech giant backed the startup with a $300 million investment.