Claude: Anthropic's assistant for writing, analysis and code

What sets Claude apart

Claude is developed by Anthropic, a US company founded by former OpenAI researchers. The assistant runs on Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5, the models listed on the official pricing page as of October 22, 2026. Its large context window lets it work through long material: reports, contracts, transcripts, entire codebases.

Day to day, Claude drafts and edits, summarizes, compares documents, creates files (spreadsheets, slides, documents) and runs code to analyze data. Artifacts show the output next to the chat, which makes it easy to tweak a text or a small app. In 2026 Anthropic also folded background task delegation into Claude, moving it closer to a true AI agent.

Free, Pro or Max: how to choose

• Free ($0): web, desktop and mobile, web search, file creation, code execution, memory, app connections;
• Pro ($20 a month, or $17 a month billed annually): more usage, scheduled tasks, Claude Code, Projects, more models, Chrome and Microsoft 365 extensions;
• Max (from $100 a month): 5x or 20x Pro usage, priority at peak times, early access to new features.

In practice, the free plan works for occasional use, but long documents can burn through its limits quickly. Pro makes sense if you use Claude for several hours a week or want to code with Claude Code.

Your chats and model training

On individual plans, Anthropic lets you opt out of training on your conversations from your account’s privacy settings. Incognito chats are never used to improve the models. Team and Enterprise plans don’t train on your data by default. Anthropic’s pricing page doesn’t mention EU data hosting for individual users, so if you’re in Europe, keep GDPR in mind before pasting other people’s personal data.

Limits worth knowing

Claude is not a substitute for human checking: it can be confidently wrong. Anthropic doesn’t publish exact numbers for the free plan’s usage limits, and some features (Claude Code, the Chrome extension) are for subscribers only. To see how it stacks up, the AI assistants comparison applies the same criteria to every service. Official pricing lives at claude.com/pricing.