Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is introducing its first smartphone app - an indication that the company is pushing more aggressively to make its Claude chatbot available to users no matter where they are.

San Francisco-based Anthropic said the new iPhone app is available for free and paid users of Claude starting May 1, and conversations will synchronise with those conducted via the web-based version of the chatbot. The app will also be able to analyse pictures - such as from photos users take - which enables the chatbot to perform tasks like image recognition. Think spotting a specific kind of finch at a bird feeder.

Anthropic was formed in 2021 by former employees of OpenAI, including Daniela Amodei and her brother Dario, who serves as its chief executive officer. The company, which has emphasised developing AI safely and responsibly, has since become one of OpenAI’s most formidable competitors, raising billions in funding from investors. It has also attracted business customers, ranging from drug maker Pfizer Inc to conversational search engine Perplexity AI.

In keeping with its enterprise focus, Anthropic also announced a new subscription plan for companies to offer employees access to the chatbot. Anthropic said the plan enables more usage of the company’s chatbot than it does via its existing US$20-per-month “pro” plan, and it will add other features, such as the ability to collaborate, in the next few weeks. The product costs US$30 per user per month, and companies must sign up at least five users.

Chatbots capable of mimicking human conversation have become an increasing focus of Silicon Valley companies - with fast technological advances fueling an investing frenzy since OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022. Although chatbots themselves are by no means new, the technology powering Claude and competitors’ bots is a more powerful tool known as a large language model, which is trained on massive swaths of the internet in order to generate text, whether it’s to answer a question or craft a poem.

But the technology has flaws. For example, the chatbots are prone to saying things that aren’t true, an issue sometimes referred to as hallucinations.

 - Bloomberg