Anthropic, known for its Claude AI assistant, is taking a big step towards mainstream users and workplace collaboration with the release of a Claude mobile app for iOS and a new Claude Team subscription plan. The moves signal Anthropic’s intent to compete more directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT not just on model capabilities, but on user-friendly packaging and enterprise offerings.
By making Claude more accessible on smartphones and adding features for organizational use, Anthropic is lowering the barrier for people and companies to integrate Claude into daily life.
Claude goes mobile: The Claude app hit Apple’s App Store in early May 2024, giving iPhone and iPad users a native way to chat with Claude anytime. The app is free to download and use (no subscription needed for basic usage, similar to how ChatGPT’s app works for free and Plus accounts).
Key features include syncing chat history across devices – so a conversation you start on your phone can be continued on Claude’s web interface and vice versa. The app also integrates new capabilities like the ability to send images to Claude for analysis.
Anthropic confirmed the app includes Claude’s recently added vision feature: you can take a photo or select an image and ask Claude about it. For example, you could photograph a complicated chart or a page from a textbook and have Claude interpret it or summarize it.
This move keeps Claude competitive with OpenAI, which introduced image understanding in ChatGPT around the same time.
The mobile app format makes AI help available “on the go” – whether you want to draft an email during a commute, solve a dispute at dinner about trivia, or get coding help while away from your computer.
“We’re entering a paradigm shift in how businesses and individuals interact with AI,” Anthropic President Daniela Amodei said in a press release, “The Team plan and Claude iOS app are the first steps in making this vision a reality”.
The quote underscores that this isn’t just about an app; it’s about weaving Claude into the fabric of daily workflows.
Early user reviews of the Claude app praised its clean design and the benefit of Claude’s 100k token memory in a mobile context – for instance, a user can upload a lengthy PDF from their phone and ask Claude to analyze it, something not possible with other AI apps that have smaller limits.
The app also supports voice input via Siri’s speech recognition (though it doesn’t yet talk back like ChatGPT’s voice feature). Anthropic likely focused on iOS first given the developer-friendly environment; an Android version is expected but not yet announced as of May 2024.
Claude Team Plan: In tandem with the app, Anthropic introduced Claude for Teams, a subscription aimed at small and medium organizations that want to use Claude collaboratively.
Priced at $30 per user per month (with a minimum of 5 users), the Team plan unlocks higher usage limits and special features beyond the free tier. This is analogous to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise or Microsoft’s Copilot for Office, but targeted at teams that may not have enterprise IT departments.
With Claude Team, a company’s employees can share a single Claude workspace if desired, or have individual accounts under a centralized billing and admin.
One highlight feature is the promise of collaborative AI sessions: Anthropic mentioned that in coming updates, multiple team members will be able to join the same Claude chat, effectively allowing group brainstorming with Claude or reviewing Claude’s outputs together.
For example, a product team could collectively refine a marketing copy with Claude in real time. Additionally, Team admins will be able to integrate Claude with internal knowledge bases or data (with Anthropic ensuring privacy).
By plugging in company documents or FAQs, Claude can serve as a quasi-consultant aware of the organization’s context. This is reminiscent of ChatGPT Enterprise’s ability to do custom knowledge retrieval, and likely uses Claude’s large context window to hold a company’s reference info.
Security and privacy are emphasized: Team plan data is encrypted and not used to train Anthropic’s models (unless users opt in), a crucial factor for companies concerned about sensitive information leakage – a lesson from early ChatGPT incidents where employees input confidential data.
Anthropic’s partnership with Amazon Web Services (where Claude is hosted via Bedrock) gives enterprise-grade security assurances, which they will leverage in pitching Team and future Enterprise plans.
Indeed, Investopedia noted that the Team plan plus AWS backing positions Claude as a secure, scalable choice for businesses adopting AI.
Competing with ChatGPT and others: OpenAI launched its ChatGPT app for iOS in May 2023 and had ChatGPT Enterprise by August 2023. Anthropic’s moves now can be seen as catch-up and differentiation.
The Claude app’s killer feature might be input size – being able to feed very large text, like whole ebooks or extensive logs, and get results on the phone. ChatGPT’s free version can’t do that, and even the GPT-4 version has smaller capacity (until any new updates from OpenAI).
On the Team side, Anthropic is betting that some organizations prefer their more transparent and safety-focused approach, especially after some high-profile companies banned employees from using ChatGPT due to data concerns.
Anthropic touts its “Constitutional AI” approach (Claude is guided by principles to avoid problematic outputs) and its track record of fewer public mishaps as a selling point for businesses that need reliability.
Daniela Amodei’s mention of “transformative journey that will redefine the nature of work” is ambitious, but signals Anthropic’s belief that AI assistants like Claude will become routine coworkers.
Public adoption and usage: Since Claude 2’s launch in July 2023, Anthropic gradually expanded access – first US/UK, then by 2024 it opened in Canada and a few other countries.
The iOS app notably came as Claude was introduced to Europe for the first time; Anthropic quietly rolled out Claude access in select EU countries around this time (ensuring compliance with GDPR and local laws beforehand).
This broadening availability, combined with the phone app’s convenience, is likely to boost Claude’s user base substantially. Anthropic doesn’t release user counts, but third-party analysts estimate Claude’s web usage climbed steadily through late 2023, and the app could multiply that.
On social media, some users noted that they switched to using Claude for certain tasks (like summarization or roleplay) because they prefer its style or it allows longer input, but they kept ChatGPT for others. With both now on the phone, switching is just a tap away – which puts pressure on each to excel or risk losing engagement.
Direct competitor to ChatGPT and Bard apps: ChatGPT’s app had a head start and offers voice conversation and access to GPT-4 for subscribers, which the Claude app doesn’t yet match fully (Claude can accept voice input via keyboard mic, but doesn’t have a built-in spoken conversation mode).
Google’s Bard, interestingly, doesn’t have a standalone app – it’s accessed via the web or integrated in other Google apps.
So Anthropic is positioning itself like OpenAI: an app you intentionally install for AI assistance. That has a branding benefit; it sits on your home screen, reminding you to use Claude.
And it may allow deeper phone integration soon (perhaps share sheet integration for summarizing articles, or Shortcuts/Siri integration to query Claude with a voice command).
An AI Magazine piece lauded how the Claude app “syncs chat history across devices and supports image analysis”, calling it a sign Anthropic is serious about “AI on the go”.
User anecdotes: Within a week of launch, stories emerged like a college student using the Claude app to scan their textbook pages and get summaries while at the library – something that felt like sci-fi a year ago.
A small business owner used Claude Team to brainstorm social media posts with her staff, collectively editing Claude’s suggestions, saving hours per week. These illustrate Anthropic’s vision: Claude not as a gimmick, but as an everyday assistant reachable from your pocket or integrated with your team’s workflow.
Of course, challenges remain. The mobile experience for any AI can be hampered by slow typing, limited screen space for long answers, and occasional network hiccups. Anthropic will need to optimize Claude’s responses for mobile reading – possibly shorter, more bulleted formats when appropriate.
And the Team plan, while promising, means Anthropic stepping into enterprise software territory with all the expectations of uptime, compliance, and support that entails.
They may need to expand their support and sales engineering teams to meet customer needs – not something a pure research startup had to worry about.
Still, Anthropic’s dual launch of the Claude app and Team plan represents a maturation of the company from research lab to consumer/business product provider. For users, it means more choice and convenience.
For the industry, it’s a sign of healthy competition pushing AI assistants into every corner of daily life – now literally from the palm of your hand.
As Maxwell Zeff of Gizmodo quipped in a Quartz piece: “Anthropic takes the fight to OpenAI… The app will put Claude into more hands and try to take some space in the AI marketplace that ChatGPT already dominates.”
With Claude now in the ring on iOS and in workplace collaboration, that fight is set to intensify, to the likely benefit of end-users who will see ever-improving AI experiences as a result.