What it is
Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic, a safety-focused AI company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers. Since its launch in March 2023, it has grown from a well-regarded writing tool into the preferred AI platform for professional and technical work.
By early 2026, Anthropic had become one of the fastest-growing AI companies in the world, with Claude embedded into the workflows of Fortune 100 companies, law firms, financial institutions, and hundreds of thousands of independent professionals.
Key features
Claude's standout capability is coding. Claude Code — its agentic coding product — holds over 54% of the AI coding market, more than double its nearest competitor. It can take on entire software projects autonomously, not just autocomplete lines. A 1-million-token context window means it can hold entire codebases or lengthy document archives in a single session without losing track.
For writing, Claude is consistently described as producing output that reads like a thoughtful editor rather than a language model. Its instruction-following is precise: it respects formatting constraints, length requirements, and stylistic rules more reliably than most alternatives.
The Projects feature lets users build persistent knowledge bases — documents, brand guidelines, reference material — that Claude applies automatically to every conversation in that project. MCP (Model Context Protocol), an open standard created by Anthropic, allows Claude to connect directly to external tools, databases, and services.
Use cases
Claude is used most heavily for software development, document analysis, long-form content creation, research, and complex multi-step professional tasks. It is the dominant choice among developers building production AI applications and the preferred daily driver for knowledge workers who need an AI that executes reliably rather than just converses.
Common tasks include writing and debugging code across entire projects, analysing lengthy contracts or reports, drafting structured professional documents, and running sustained autonomous workflows through Claude Code or Claude Cowork.
