Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant for writing, analysis, and coding, available on the web, desktop, and mobile. It runs on a freemium model with a genuine free tier, and paid consumer plans start at $17 per month (Pro, billed annually; $20/month if billed monthly), giving individuals and teams API-backed access to the Claude model family without running their own infrastructure.
Who builds it
Claude is developed by Anthropic. The consumer product at claude.ai sits alongside a developer API that exposes the same underlying model family, so prompts typed into the chat interface and calls made by developers against the API draw on the same models and the same pricing logic.
What it does
At its core, Claude turns natural-language prompts into text output for writing, analysis, and coding tasks — drafting, editing, summarizing, reasoning through problems, and generating or reviewing code. Claude supports a context window of up to 1,000,000 tokens on supported plans, long enough to hold large documents, full codebases, or long-running conversations in a single session. A built-in web search tool gives Claude access to real-time information beyond its training cutoff, and citations for sources drawn from search results are always enabled once the tool is used. Claude also supports adjustable response styles, letting you customize how it formats and delivers answers, and it is built for team use with shared workspace plans above the individual tiers.
Core features
- Freemium access with a genuine free tier and paid plans from $17/month (Pro, billed annually)
- Up to 1,000,000-token context window on supported plans
- Web search with source citations always enabled when the tool is invoked
- Adjustable response styles for tailoring tone and formatting
- Team plans for organizations of 5 to 150 seats, with Enterprise above that
- Full API access, priced per token — roughly $10 per 1M input tokens, $50 per 1M output tokens, and $1 per 1M cached-input tokens on the flagship model
- SOC 2 Type I and Type II compliance credentials
Who it's for
Claude suits writers, analysts, researchers, and developers who want a single general-purpose assistant for both prose and code rather than a narrow, single-task tool. The free tier is enough to evaluate it; Pro raises usage limits and context-window access for heavier individual use. Teams that need a shared workspace move to the Team plan, sized for 5 to 150 seats, and organizations with stricter procurement, security, or support requirements move to Enterprise.
Data and compliance
By default, Anthropic runs Claude's inference in a "global" geography, meaning requests may be processed in any available location for optimal performance and availability; "us" and "global" are currently the only inference-geo options Anthropic offers, so full regional data residency beyond those two choices is not yet available. Anthropic holds SOC 2 Type I and Type II compliance credentials for the security of user information. Anyone with strict regional data-residency requirements should confirm the current options on Anthropic's own data-residency documentation before rolling Claude out at scale.