Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…Anthropic enters the enterprise AI game, OpenAI execs (and former execs) advance billion-dollar funding deals, the DOJ investigates Nvidia, and Elon Musk spreads election disinformation.
Anthropic yesterday announced it’s launching Claude for Enterprise, a new tier of its Claude chatbot aimed at large organizations. While the company’s Team plan launched earlier this year introduced features for collaboration (such as the ability to create projects and share chats across teammates), the Enterprise plan goes a step further by allowing businesses to work with their own proprietary information inside Claude. It also has the type of enterprise-grade controls and security features big businesses need to even consider using such a tool, including the ability to securely manage user access and the promise that the company won’t train AI models on customer data and interactions with Claude.
For the most part, the offering is about the same as ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI’s plan for enterprises that was launched a year ago. Both offer enterprises a more secure working environment and the ability to turn the chatbot into a company-specific assistant that can analyze the business’s own data, in addition to helping with general tasks like brainstorming and drafting content.
Enterprise is where the AI smart money is
It’s no surprise Anthropic is following suit by trying to court enterprises—as I’ve been reporting over recent weeks, enterprise AI is big business and turning out to be the most significant slice of the AI pie thus far. OpenAI said users of its Enterprise tier grew 4x in just a few months from 150,000 in January of this year to 600,000 in April. OpenAI is also gearing its investment and M&A strategies around enterprise AI, while at the same time, AI startups with B2B business models are scooping up the vast majority of VC deals compared to AI startups with B2C models. After all, enterprises have the most resources available to experiment with AI, especially as many shareholders continue to push for AI adoption.
Anthropic may be playing catch-up to OpenAI, but the increase in choices can only be good for customers and the overall state of enterprise AI. It will be interesting to see if customers of ChatGPT Enterprise that chose the chatbot because it was the only option at the time switch to Anthropic’s new offering, especially with the rival startup’s reputation for having a safer approach to AI.
Anthropic wants to compete on context length
Anthropic is offering users a few reasons to pick its product over ChatGPT. First, there’s the context window, referring to the number of tokens (words or parts of words) a model can handle at once. Anthropic for Enterprise boasts a 500,000 token context window, which the company says is “equivalent to hundreds of sales transcripts, dozens of 100+ page documents, or medium-sized codebases.” This is more than double that of ChatGPT Enterprise, which offers a 128,000 context window.
Anthropic’s Enterprise tier also introduces a native GitHub integration for syncing GitHub repositories with Claude. This gives the model direct access to customers’ codebases so their engineering teams can tap the chatbot for assistance with debugging issues, iterating on new features, or onboarding new engineers.
The plan is available now, but one detail that’s not clear is pricing. An Anthropic spokesperson tells Eye on AI that Enterprise pricing is customized for each company based on factors like the number of users, volume of queries, and specific feature requirements such as the depth of integration with company systems. ChatGPT Enterprise uses a similar, customized pricing model.
Corporate adoption of gen AI remains challenging
While the number of options for businesses to incorporate AI into their workflows is growing, it’s important to note that doing so still poses considerable challenges. Companies have to train employees on these tools, decide what processes they’re actually good for, and ensure they’re being used within the bounds of what the company permits. For some, there are also copyright and compliance concerns, plus the fact that generative AI is still plagued by hallucinations and opens new security vulnerabilities. And yet, the great AI adoption continues.
And with that, here’s more AI news.
Sage Lazzaro
sage.lazzaro@consultant.fortune.com
sagelazzaro.com
Correction: Due to an editing error, Tuesday's edition of Eye on AI misspelled the last name of Honeywell CEO Vimal Kapur in several instances.
