Claude AI

Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, an AI safety company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. Unlike many AI systems built primarily for capability, Claude is designed from the ground up with safety and helpfulness as co-equal priorities.

The foundation of Claude's development is Constitutional AI (CAI), a training methodology pioneered by Anthropic in 2022. Constitutional AI works by giving the model a set of principles — a "constitution" — and training it to critique and revise its own responses according to those principles. In January 2026, Anthropic published a comprehensive updated constitution that shifts from rule-based to reason-based AI alignment, teaching Claude why to act ethically rather than simply what to do.

Claude excels at a wide range of tasks that require careful reasoning, precise language, and nuanced understanding. It is particularly well-regarded for long-form writing and editing, complex document analysis, in-depth research assistance, software engineering tasks, and philosophical or intellectual discussions.

One of Claude's most distinctive technical features is its extended context window — Claude can process and reason over very long documents in a single conversation, making it especially useful for tasks like contract review, manuscript editing, codebase analysis, and research synthesis.

Claude's design reflects Anthropic's belief that AI safety and capability are complementary rather than conflicting goals. The model is trained to be genuinely helpful, honest about its limitations and uncertainties, and to avoid harmful outputs — not through rigid rules, but through internalized values and reasoning.

Claude is available through Claude.ai, Anthropic's API, and is integrated into a growing number of third-party applications and developer tools. It supports multiple modalities including text, code, and document analysis, and offers models at different capability and speed tiers to suit various use cases.