What Is Claude?

Claude. A sweet old man smoking a pipe in his favourite slippers.

Or possibly one of THE most powerful AI tools ever created, like ever.

Either way, keep your slippers on because this is going to be a very important read.

Let’s waste no more time and go straight in with:

Claude is an AI assistant made by a company called Anthropic.

You talk to it, and it talks back to you.

(Unlike my group chat for next years holiday. Seriously guys can we book Almaty or not??)

In plain English:

Claude is a conversational AI that you can ask questions, give tasks, and have back-and-forth conversations with.

(like friends used to be before social media! sorry too dark?)

Claude is a direct competitor to other tools that you might have heard of like:

Claude has been getting a lot of press at the moment for a combination of really cool new features and standing up for safety and governance.

So tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are still out there and you can of course use these as well. But Claude is currently the most popular choice for people in the AI world.

Don’t worry, I will explain why next!

A LOT!

Claude has rapidly expanded its capabilities over the past year.

So much so that to call it a “chatbot” now would probably make Claude get annoyed at you.

Of course, all of the standard ChatBot features that we learned to love from ChatGPT are there:

But there are some more advanced features that Claude has recently either introduced or massively improved upon:

And that's just the starting point. Honestly, by the time I have finished writing this blog, Claude will probably have dropped 5 new features.

My suggestion would be to just get started for yourself and see what types of tasks you can Claude to complete for you.

Claude is made by Anthropic, an AI safety company founded in 2021.

Anthropic was actually started by some former OpenAI employees (the ChatGPT folks) who wanted to build AI with a stronger focus on safety and reliability.

(huh, nice to know that someone is thinking of that at least)

In terms of trust, Claude has a very strong reputation. It is used by literally millions of people and businesses worldwide and has not been the victim of any major data breaches or leaks.

(sorry Lovable!)

What is more, for an evil tech company, Anthropic do genuinely seem to care. Shocking I know.

They publishes a lot of information about how Claude works and what it will and won't do, which is a good sign for transparency.

They were also in the news lately, standing up to the Pentagon of all places! This won them a lot of users as people appreciated a tech company that, you know, has a soul.

Of course, this is all just the case as I write this. In a couple of years Anthropic may turn out to be the Empire of our Star Wars universe, but for now, they seem OK.

There are a few different ways that people can use Claude, and it really depends on 1) whether you pay for a subscription and 2) what your use case is.

This is the most simple way of interacting with Claude and the way that the majority of people use Claude. You simply go to www.claude.ai and create an account.

Then you can start chatting away with Claude for free.

The same as the first but now you access via an app.

Claude Claude is more aimed at developers or anyone wanting to write code. It allows Claude access to your codebase directly, so it can make changes directly into the repository rather than you having to copy and paste it all.

Claude Cowork is an agentic tool. Like Claude Code, it is a version of Claude that you have to download locally onto your computer. Claude Cowork is designed to have access to your local files, so that it can have direct access to your tools and resources. The idea behind this is similar to Claude Code: no need to copy and paste from the chat, Claude can directly make changes to files stored localled on your computer

I will write a whole blog on Claude Code and Cowork but for now, this is just a quick overview of the different ways of using Claude.

The first question I always ask when I hear about a cool new tool.

Yeah, but is it free?

(sorry, but I’m the type of girl who walks 5km rather than pay 5 quid for the taxi)

The answer is. Kind of?

Anyone can get started with Claude for free, but of course, nothing in life is really free, and the free version of Claude gets pretty limited, quite fast!

You can decide to upgrade your membership to various levels depending on your usage and needs.

But for now, you can just get started for free by doing the following:

(as of writing this, Claude has the following tiers: Free, Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise)

Once you get your head around Claude and what it can do, you might decide to upgrade for more tokens, capbilities and fancy stuff.

My closing comment about Claude will be an uncharacteristically personal one.

If there is ONE TOOL that you really spend time getting to understanding in depth, I would say make it Claude.

I am not exaggerating when I say that this is a BLOODY powerful tool, and the possiblities of what you can do and create with it are not just endless, but genuinely useful.

So, take the time to get to know Claude. It’s quite intuitive and you will quickly understand why so many people (myself include) are big fans of Claude.

Good luck!

The most important bits from this post: