On Monday, Anthropic launched a hotly anticipated reminiscence operate for its Claude chatbot.
In a YouTube video, the corporate demonstrated a consumer asking what they’d been chatting about with Claude earlier than their trip. Claude searches previous chats to learn and summarize them for the consumer, then asks in the event that they’d like to maneuver on and preserve engaged on the identical undertaking.
“By no means lose monitor of your work once more,” the corporate wrote. “Claude now remembers your previous conversations, so you’ll be able to seamlessly proceed initiatives, reference earlier discussions, and construct in your concepts with out ranging from scratch each time.”
The feature works across web, desktop, and mobile, and it may possibly preserve totally different initiatives and workspaces separate. It began rolling out to Claude’s Max, Staff, and Enterprise subscription tiers right now — simply go to “Settings” underneath “Profile” and swap the characteristic on underneath “Search and reference chats” — and the corporate stated different plans ought to obtain entry quickly.
However there’s an vital caveat right here: It’s not but a persistent reminiscence characteristic like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Claude will solely retrieve and reference your previous chats while you ask it to, and it’s not constructing a consumer profile, based on Anthropic spokesperson Ryan Donegan.
Anthropic and OpenAI have been going head-to-head within the AI arms race for fairly some time, racing to roll out competing options and functionalities — like voice modes, bigger context home windows, and new subscription tiers — as they each increase ever-increasing funding quantities. Final week, OpenAI launched GPT-5, and Anthropic is at present seeking to shut a spherical that might worth it as excessive as $170 billion.
Reminiscence features are one other means main AI firms need to entice and preserve customers on one chatbot service, rising “stickiness” and consumer engagement.
Chatbots’ reminiscence features have been the topic of on-line debate in latest weeks, as ChatGPT has been each lauded and lambasted for its references to customers’ previous conversations, with some customers controversially treating it as a therapist and others experiencing mental health struggles that some are referring to as “ChatGPT psychosis.”