Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, built Claude around a training approach the company calls Constitutional AI, training the model against a written set of principles rather than relying purely on human feedback to shape its behavior. That safety-research background shaped the company's priorities from the start.
Claude has become particularly associated with long-context tasks, analyzing lengthy documents, codebases, or multi-file projects in a single conversation, and with coding specifically, where Claude Code extends the same underlying models into an agentic command-line tool for software development work. Multiple model tiers balance speed against capability for different tasks and budgets.
A free plan covers everyday use with usage limits, Pro costs $20 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly, and Max plans start at $100 a month for heavier use. For anyone whose work involves long documents, codebases, or tasks where careful, well-reasoned output matters more than speed, Claude's emphasis on those areas specifically shapes what it's most commonly chosen for.
