Anthropic’s Claude generative AI model can now spend more time searching for answers to your queries — if you pay for the right plan.
Claude can also integrate with other apps, including PayPal, Cloudflare, Jira and Confluence, with more expected soon, Anthropic announced in a blog post on May 1. Anthropic also expanded the ability to access web search to include all paid plans.
This year, the AI industry has been in a race for new and more useful features, and research is a big part of it. Google’s Gemini has a tool called Deep Research that is available to all users for free. OpenAI’s ChatGPT Deep Research mode is available to anyone with a paid plan. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
These deeper research tools can search the web and pull together more complete answers to your queries. The AI models will often cite the source of information, although you should still verify it because of the risk of errors known as hallucinations.
Regardless of what AI tool you use, “the thing about this is you’ve got to check the sources. It’ll make up the sources too,” Alex Mahadevan, director of the MediaWise media literacy program at the Poynter Institute, told me.
Anthropic said its improved research function can spend five to 45 minutes finding and reviewing sources. Those sources can come from internal sources — like your own documents or apps you’ve connected — or from external sources it finds on the internet. The model breaks requests down into smaller parts and handles each separately, then compiles a full report.
The advanced research function is available in beta on Anthropic’s Max, Team and Enterprise plans. The Max plan starts at $100 per month. Anthropic said it will soon be available on the more affordable Pro plan, which costs as little as $17 per month, depending on how you pay.
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