Anthropic Launches Newest AI Model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Amazon-backed Anthropic has launched an updated AI model (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) as well as a new layout to boost user productivity.

It was only back in March when Anthropic had launched its next-generation Claude 3 model family, and in early May it launched a business-focused plan of its Claude chatbot (Claude Team), as well as an Claude iOS app.

Now just three months after launching its the Claude 3 model, Anthropic has announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet – its first release in the forthcoming Claude 3.5 model family.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet

San Francisco-based Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI executives and makes a chatbot called Claude that competes with the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google DeepMind’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama.

“Our Claude 3.5 Sonnet raises the industry bar for intelligence, outperforming competitor models and Claude 3 Opus on a wide range of evaluations, with the speed and cost of our mid-tier model, Claude 3 Sonnet,” claimed the firm.

Anthropic said that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is now available for free on Claude.ai and the Claude iOS app, while Claude Pro and Team plan subscribers can access it with significantly higher rate limits.

The new AI model is also available via the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. The model costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, with a 200K token context window.

According to Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Sonnet sets new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval). It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humour, and complex instructions, and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone, said the firm.

Indeed, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is said to operate at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus.

Anthropic also said that in an internal agentic coding evaluation, Claude 3.5 Sonnet solved 64 percent of problems, outperforming Claude 3 Opus which solved 38 percent. It provided some benchmark figures comparing its performance to OpenAI’s Chat-4o and Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro.

“Claude 3.5 Sonnet is our strongest vision model yet, surpassing Claude 3 Opus on standard vision benchmarks,” the firm stated. “These step-change improvements are most noticeable for tasks that require visual reasoning, like interpreting charts and graphs.”

Claude 3.5 Sonnet can also accurately transcribe text from imperfect images – a core capability for retail, logistics, and financial services, where AI may glean more insights from an image, graphic or illustration than from text alone.

New layout

Anthropic has also introduced Artifacts on Claude.ai, which is a new feature that expands how users can interact with Claude.

When a user asks Claude to generate content like code snippets, text documents, or website designs, these Artifacts appear in a dedicated window alongside their conversation.

Anthropic says this creates a dynamic workspace where they can see, edit, and build upon Claude’s creations in real-time, seamlessly integrating AI-generated content into their projects and workflows.

Anthropic also sought to address ongoing privacy and security concerns about AI, saying its models are subjected to rigorous testing and have been trained to reduce misuse.

It said that as part of our commitment to safety and transparency, it has engaged with external experts to test and refine the safety mechanisms within this latest model.

And the firm recently provided Claude 3.5 Sonnet to the UK’s Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute (UK AISI) for pre-deployment safety evaluation.

The UK AISI completed tests of 3.5 Sonnet and shared their results with the US AI Safety Institute (US AISI) as part of a Memorandum of Understanding, made possible by the partnership between the US and UK AISIs announced earlier this year.

Anthropic said it aims to substantially improve the tradeoff curve between intelligence, speed, and cost every few months. To complete the Claude 3.5 model family, it will be releasing Claude 3.5 Haiku and Claude 3.5 Opus later this year.

Anthropic investors

Anthropic has been backed by some big names in the tech sector.

In March 2024 Amazon completed its $4bn investment in the AI firm, after providing an additional $2.75bn in funding after its September 2023 funding input.

The firm has also received $300 million from Google in February 2023.