Anthropic Claude’s New ‘Computer Use:’ 5 Things To Know

Anthropic introduced several new features in Claude and one is generating particular buzz.

Anthropic recently made several announcements, including an upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and a new model called Claude 3.5 Haiku.

One announcement that seems to be generating the most buzz is a new “computer use” capability within Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

One expert says the new feature outpaces similar capabilities in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

What is computer use and why is it exciting those in the AI space? Here are five things to know about Anthropic Claude’s new computer use feature:

  1. With computer use, Claude can interact with tools that can manipulate a computer desktop environment. In a video, Anthropic demonstrated how Claude can interact with a spreadsheet to automate filling out vendor request forms.
  2. Computer use is still in beta, but some companies are already putting it to use, including Asana, Canva, Cognition, DoorDash, Replit and The Browser Company, according to an Anthropic blog post. Replit “is using Claude 3.5 Sonnet's capabilities with computer use and UI navigation to develop a key feature that evaluates apps as they’re being built for their Replit Agent product,” according to the post.

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  1. ChatGPT offers similar capabilities as computer use, but “but OpenAI’s offering suffers from the inability of ChatGPT to consistently display compelling visualizations of user-uploaded data, and the feature has seen relatively little investment since its initial release,” Yiannis Antoniou, head of data, analytics and AI at Lab49, said in an statement.

  2. Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the first frontier AI model to offer computer use in public beta, Anthropic said.

  3. As of Oct. 22, developers can build with the computer use beta on the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

“What Claude gets really right is the flawless execution and whiz-bang factor of its integration; they clearly have thought thoroughly through the UX and have managed to create a compelling offering for the general public that far outshines the efforts of its bigger and more well-known rival,” Antoniou said.

“While there will still be people arguing that one can try to pry Excel from their cold dead hands, Claude’s capabilities right now offer an enticing alternative to manual data analysis for a full array of use cases,” he added.