(Bloomberg) — Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic PBC, which originally aimed its Claude chatbot at businesses, is looking to capitalize on recent inroads with consumers by making the software more appealing to everyday people.
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Since late last year, Anthropic has tasked employees with improving how its chatbot handles personal queries, like questions about health, travel and recipes, said Mike Krieger, co-leader of the company’s Labs team, which focuses on experimental AI software.
Speaking on the sidelines of a company conference in San Francisco, Krieger said Anthropic is focused on the “quality, polish and performance” of its chatbot. That includes reducing the amount of time it takes for a user to query Claude after opening the mobile app.
“We took it from something like five or six seconds down to like a second today,” Krieger, who previously co-founded Instagram, said in an interview Wednesday.
Anthropic released the first version of its Claude chatbot in 2023. Though the company has built AI software geared toward enterprise users, it has made strides with consumers in recent months, buoyed by the viral success of two of its products for helping people streamline tasks. The startup also reached a wider audience with a Super Bowl commercial positioning its Claude chatbot as an ad-free alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
A standoff with the Pentagon earlier this year over AI safeguards has helped, too, pushing Claude up the app store charts. The software is currently the second-most-popular free app in Apple’s App Store in the US, sandwiched between OpenAI’s ChatGPT at No. 1 and Google’s Gemini app in third place.
In March, the company said daily signups had quadrupled since the start of the year. At the time, more than 1 million people were signing up every day, Anthropic said.
As part of an effort to meet growing demand for its software, Anthropic also said Wednesday that it inked a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for computing power. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
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