Anthropic launches Claude, its first public assistant

Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers, released Claude on 14 March 2023 through a chat interface and an API, after a closed alpha with partners including Notion, Quora and DuckDuckGo. Two versions shipped: Claude, and the faster and cheaper Claude Instant.

Why it mattered Companies buying access to frontier models had a second supplier from the day GPT-4 shipped, offered by a laboratory that presented its safety work as the reason to choose it.