What is Anthropic’s Claude and what is it capable of?

Claude is a family¹ of large language models (LLM) built by Anthropic. Like other frontier LLMs, they can be used for many tasks including summarization, search, creative and collaborative writing, Q&A, and coding.

Anthropic considered releasing Claude to the general public in spring 2022, but waited until March 2023, after the release of ChatGPT, with the stated aim of avoiding triggering an arms race.

Claude’s initial release was the first LLM to make use of Constitutional AI. Anthropic claimed it was trained to prioritize helpfulness, honesty, and harmlessness (HHH) and found that it was capable of Moral Self-Correction.