On Thursday, Anthropic, backed by Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN and Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG GOOGL Google, announced that its Claude chatbot can now search the internet, bringing it in line with competitors like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Mistral's Le Chat.
What Happened: The feature, currently in preview for paid users in the U.S., is available via Claude 3.7 Sonnet—the company's most advanced model.
Users can enable web search through profile settings in the Claude web app.
"When Claude incorporates information from the web into its responses, it provides direct citations so you can easily fact-check sources," Anthropic said in a blog post. "Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format."
Why It’s Important: The move marks a shift from Anthropic's earlier stance that Claude should be "self-contained." While web results were previously off-limits, competitive pressure appears to have changed that.
Anthropic's challenge now is to offer relevance without sacrificing accuracy.
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A study published earlier this month by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that AI chatbots, including ChatGPT and Gemini, gave incorrect responses to over 60% of queries involving news.
In March 2025, Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in a Series E funding round, elevating its valuation to $61.5 billion.
Last month, the company also filed a plea with a federal court to challenge a U.S. government proposal that aimed to restrict Google’s investments in AI startups.
Image Courtesy: Shutterstock.com
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