Anthropic Unveils Business Plan, new iPhone App

Anthropic launches a paid enterprise AI plan & free iOS app for Claude’s access.

Anthropic, a globally renowned generative AI startup with a substantial financial investment of $7.6 billion, is introducing a novel iOS application and a paid plan tailored for enterprises operating in heavily regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and legal. 

The enterprise plan, Team, provides customers with enhanced privileges to access Anthropic’s Claude 3 family of generative AI models and supplementary administrative and user management capabilities.

Scott White, product manager at Anthropic, told TechCrunch, “Anthropic has introduced the Team plan in response to rising demand from enterprise customers who wish to deploy Claude’s advanced AI capabilities across their organizations.” “The Team plan is intended for organizations across various sectors and scales that desire to provide their staff members with a supervised and reliable setting to utilize Claude’s language comprehension and generation functionalities.”

The Team plan, which is available in addition to Anthropic’s Pro individual premium plan, provides “significantly increased usage per user” in comparison to Pro, allowing users to engage in a more significant number of conversations with Claude. (We have requested figures from Anthropic.) Team clients receive a context window worth 200,000 tokens (approximately 150,000 words) in addition to all the benefits of Pro, including early access to new features.

Context, or window, pertains to the input data (such as text) evaluated by a model before producing output (such as additional text). Small context window models need to remember even the most recent conversational content. In contrast, larger context window models escape this pitfall and, as an added benefit, better understand the flow of data they consume. 

Additionally, the Team will introduce new toggles for invoicing and user management. Anthropic says that in the coming weeks, the platform will also receive collaboration functionalities, such as a canvas for team members to collaborate on AI-generated documents and projects, integrations with data repos such as codebases and customer relationship management platforms (e.g., Salesforce), and citations to verify AI-generated claims (models, including Anthropic’s, have a tendency to hallucinate). This is most intriguing to this author.

Team customers will soon have the opportunity to utilize the tool usage functionalities of Claude 3, which has just begun to open beta. Similar to OpenAI’s GPTs, this enables users to empower Claude 3 with custom tools to perform a wider variety of tasks, such as obtaining a company’s current stock price or the local weather report.

“The Team plan positions Anthropic to capture a significant enterprise market share as more companies transition from AI experimentation to full-scale deployment in pursuit of transformative business outcomes by enabling businesses to integrate Claude into their collaborative workflows deeply,” said White. “The emphasis has shifted from rapidly experimenting with AI in 2023 to identifying and scaling applications that deliver tangible business value in 2024.” 

Anthropic may speak a big game, but convincing businesses to join its cause may still require significant effort. 

49% of companies surveyed by Gartner recently stated that estimating and demonstrating the value of AI projects is challenging, making them difficult to sell internally. According to a distinct survey conducted by McKinsey, 66% of executives believe that realizing significant business outcomes through generative AI will take years.

However, enormous corporate expenditures on generative AI are anticipated. According to IDC, the projected value will increase nearly eightfold, from $15.1 billion in 2023 to $15.1 billion in 2027.

Consequently, generative AI providers, notably OpenAI, are likely to intensify their efforts to address enterprises’ needs. 

More than 600,000 users have recently subscribed to ChatGPT Enterprise, the enterprise tier of OpenAI’s generative AI platform ChatGPT. In addition, it has implemented many tools designed to meet corporate governance and compliance requirements, such as a new user interface for comparing the quality and performance of models. 

The Team plan from Anthropic is priced competitively at $30 per user per month, invoiced monthly, and requires a minimum of five seats. Although OpenAI does not disclose the cost of ChatGPT Enterprise, Reddit users claim to have been quoted between $30 and $60 per user per month for 120 and 250 users, respectively.  

White stated that Anthropic’s Team plan is cost-effective and competitive regarding its value to organizations. “The straightforward nature of the per-user model permits businesses to begin modestly and expand progressively.” This framework facilitates Anthropic’s expansion and sustainability while empowering organizations to exploit artificial intelligence strategically.

Undoubtedly, Anthropic’s launching Team operating from a position of strength is advantageous. 

Following a $2 billion investment by Google, Amazon concluded its $4 billion investment in Anthropic in March. According to reports, the organization is progressing towards surpassing $850 million in annualized revenue by the conclusion of 2024, representing a 70% growth compared to an earlier estimate. Anthropics might perceive Team as the most logical progression towards further expansion. However, it appears that Anthropic can afford to allow Team to develop organically for the time being while it attempts to persuade remaining businesses that its generative AI is superior to the competition. 

Anthropic iOS application

An additional development for Anthropic on Wednesday is the release of an iOS application. Considering the company’s noticeable increase in the recruitment of iOS engineers in recent months, this outcome is hardly unexpected. 

The iOS application grants users access to Claude 3, which encompasses complimentary and upgraded Pro and Team tiers. It utilizes Claude 3’s vision capabilities and synchronizes with Anthropic’s web client to provide real-time analysis for uploaded or saved images. Users may submit screenshots of charts from presentations, for instance, and request that Claude offer summaries to them.

“By providing the same features as the web version, such as the ability to sync chat history and upload photos, the iOS app aims to integrate Claude into users’ daily personal and professional lives,” White explained. Complementing the web interface and API offerings offers users an additional channel to interact with the AI assistant.” We will continue to explore new methods to deliver value to users across multiple platforms and use cases, including mobile app development and functionality, as we develop and refine our technologies.