Anthropic Will Accelerate
Over the last few months, Anthropic has released several updates to its 3.5 series of Claude models, introducing impactful new features like Computer Use, Claude Artifacts, Analysis tool and Visual PDF. Despite these additions, Anthropic still hasn’t increased its version number. In the latest podcast episode with Lex Fridman, however, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed intriguing details about Anthropic’s future to pique one’s curiosity about what’s coming next. Amodei revealed that their Opus model isn’t going anywhere, adding that Anthropic will release the much-anticipated update and launch Claude 3.5 Opus. He further revealed that Claude 4.0 will be released as per the usual business cycle. Even on the capital front, Anthropic is set to make big moves. Reports claiming Anthropic is raising another round of funds from Amazon have surfaced. So what does Claude’s future look like? Scaling First, Nomenclature Comes Last While Amodei confirmed that Anthropic will continue to upgrade Claude, he did not promise that newer versions would adhere to the expected nomenclature and may not carry the ‘4.0’ tag. “I don’t want to commit to it (a naming scheme). I would expect in a normal course of business that Claude 4 would come after Claude 3. 5, but you never know in this wacky field,” he said. Amodei also revealed that Anthropic’s main focus is improving the current models and shifting their capabilities. He suggested that the latest Sonnet 3.5 performs better than the Opus 3 and that their lightest, new Haiku 3.5 performs better than Sonnet 3 and is on par with the Opus 3. So, Claude 4.0 can only be expected if Anthropic achieves significant performance improvements in the latest Claude Sonnet 3.5 and the upcoming Opus 3.5. “Scaling is continuing. There will definitely be more powerful models coming from us than the models that exist today. That is certain. Or if there aren’t, we’ve deeply failed as a company,” Amodei further said. Maximum Value for Partners Over the last few months, Anthropic has mainly focused on making Claude the best coding model. While no other model, including the latest OpenAI o1, has matched Sonnet 3.5’s coding capabilities, Anthropic faces some competition from China. The latest Qwen 2.5-Coder, an open-source model from Alibaba, supposedly scores better in benchmarks than the 3.5 Sonnet in coding. Moreover, they’re also offering an ‘Artifacts-like’ experience for free on HuggingFace. It may take some time to check if the Qwen 2.5 Coder is better than Claude, but if it is, Anthropic will have to level up. AI coding tools like Cursor, and GitHub Copilot rely heavily on the capabilities of Claude 3.5 Sonnet. A few weeks ago in GitHub Universe, Anthropic’s chief science officer Jared Kaplan, underscored the importance of staying on top of their game. “Our mission has always been to get the most frontier model capabilities in as many people’s hands as quickly as possible. If we can’t deploy them now, they’ll be obsolete in six months to a year,” he said. “Models have gone from 3% in January of this year to 50% in October of this year… But I would guess that in another 10 months, we’ll probably get pretty close. We’ll be at least 90%,” Amodei predicted. Computer Use was a wild surprise. Anthropic, one of the first companies to release a feature that lets users control their devices, said it didn’t take a lot of computation and effort to build the feature. “We want to get up to the human level reliability of 80-90% just like anywhere else,” revealed Amodei, suggesting that Anthropic has big plans with Computer Use. Considering that Microsoft Copilot Vision has joined the game, Google’s plan with Jarvis, and OpenAI’s plans to release their new agentic feature, the competition seems to be heating up. Anthropic has always focused on partnerships, and it looks like it will continue to do so in the future. Interestingly, Claude’s revenue generated from APIs and enterprise is more than that of OpenAI. “Our view has been: let 1,000 flowers bloom,” said Amodei, indicating that he wants to continue building more partnerships. This raises an intriguing question: will AI hardware innovators, such as Rabbit and Humane, soon turn towards Computer Use as the missing link to bridge gaps in their ecosystems? Moreover, Amazon will certainly look to improve its consumer hardware product game with Computer Use. A few days ago, AWS revealed its plans to enhance and scale Anthropic’s models using the Trainium 2 Chip. All About RSP Amodei also suggested they will continue to scale these features while keeping safety in mind. Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy outlines different levels of AI safety, with level 1 being the safest, and level 5 indicating the highest risks and danger. “We are working actively to prepare ASL-3 security measures as well as ASL-3 deployment measures. I’m not going to go into details, but we’ve made a lot of progress on both, and I think we’ll be ready quite soon. I would not be surprised at all if we hit ASL-3 next year,” he said. Moreover, Amodei revealed that this would not disrupt their scaling plans. For example, he said that despite the safety concerns raised by Computer Use, Anthropic will continue to amplify its capabilities. “I definitely feel that it’s important to get these capabilities out there. As models get more powerful, we’re going to have to grapple with how we use these capabilities safely,” Amode further said. Recently, Amodei’s reputation was under fire. Their partnership with the US government for defence applications raised many concerns, and Anthropic certainly has more to prove. Eyeing New Sectors A few months ago, Anthropic made its AI models available on the AWS marketplace and revealed its intent to provide Claude to the government so that its frontier models can be used in various sectors. “Government agencies can use Claude to provide improved citizen services, streamline document review and preparation, enhance policymaking with data-driven insights, and create realistic training scenarios,” Anthropic said. In the near future, AI could assist in disaster response coordination, enhance public health initiatives, or optimise energy grids for sustainability. While Anthropic is set to fulfil the defence sector, it is quite possible that it will target more such sectors with its newer and more powerful models in the future. This also aligns with Amodei’s vision for the future. In his essay titled ‘Machines of Loving Grace’, he outlined all the possible ways AI can improve humanity. “I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be,” he wrote.
“Scaling is continuing. There will definitely be more powerful models coming from us than the models that exist today. That is certain. Or if there aren’t, we’ve deeply failed as a company,” said Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO.
“Scaling is continuing. There will definitely be more powerful models coming from us than the models that exist today. That is certain. Or if there aren’t, we’ve deeply failed as a company,” said Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO.
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Supreeth is an engineering graduate who is curious about the world of artificial intelligence and loves to write stories on how it is solving problems and shaping the future of humanity.