AI thinks before it speaks

PRICING: CLAUDE IS THE MOST CAREFUL OF THE BIG FOUR ASSISTANTS, BUT CAN BE COSTLY

- Arthur Goldstuck and Jason Bannier

Anthropic’s Claude is the most careful of the big four AI assistants and that caution turns out to be its most expensive habit.

What is it?

Ask a roomful of South Africans which AI chatbot lives on their phone, and almost all will say ChatGPT. Increasingly, however, they will mention Claude as one they’ve heard about, but have yet to try out.

Claude’s parent company Anthropic is in the news for both the right and wrong reasons, with the US government banning the use by foreign nationals of its latest AI large language model, Fable 5, because it is regarded as being too powerful to fall into the “wrong” hands.

But even Claude, available in both free and paid versions in South Africa, is a cut above the rest, for one simple reason: It “thinks” before it speaks. Or, at least, it asks clarifying questions before it hazards a guess.

I have used a paid version of Claude for several months, mostly the current Sonnet 4.6 model running inside the ordinary Claude.ai web and desktop apps for research, editing, document analysis and one deliberately unfair test: asking it to write a press release that did not read like a press release.

If you feed Claude a brief and ask it to avoid the stock phrases of machine-written content it largely complies, because Anthropic has clearly put real effort into training that tone out of its own model. Whether the same discipline survives in the cheaper tools built on top of Claude’s underlying technology, churning out marketing copy by the thousand, is a different and less reassuring question.