Claude 3.5 Sonnet

An excellent AI model for a wide variety of tasks: it's fast, versatile and the current leader for coding

- NIGEL POWELL

Anthropic – founded in 2021 by ex-OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei – launched the Claude large language model in 2023, billing it as a “safe and reliable” model that would avoid AI hazards such as hallucination. However, unlike ChatGPT, it failed to capture the public imagination – until the release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June.

The free account is limited to five requests per minute and 300K tokens per day. It sounds a lot, but if you want to do anything more than simple text work, such as summaries or translation, you’re better off upgrading to the Pro Plan at £18 a month. This entitles you to 4,000 requests per minute, access to its fastest model and priority access. Or you can use a third-party app and the Claude API, which doesn’t suffer any obvious rate limits; I regularly use the API with TypingMind.​com on a PAYG token basis and it’s great.

The Claude universe is split into two. Claude chat (