What is it? Claude is an AI assistant built by Anthropic, a company founded with one core focus: making AI that is safe, honest, and genuinely useful. While many AI tools optimise for speed and volume of output, Claude is designed to reason carefully, handle nuance well, and give answers you can actually trust — even on complex or sensitive topics.

If you’ve ever felt like an AI gave you a confident answer that turned out to be wrong, or produced content that felt hollow and generic, Claude was built specifically to address those frustrations. It’s used by writers, researchers, developers, analysts, students, and professionals who need an AI that thinks before it responds rather than just generating something that sounds plausible.

Claude is available for free at claude.ai and also powers many third-party apps and products through Anthropic’s API.

How to Use Claude (Step by Step)

Go to claude.ai and create a free account using your email or Google account

Type your request in the message box — Claude works best when you give it context and detail, so don’t be afraid to write a full paragraph explaining what you need

For long documents, reports, or files you want Claude to analyse, use the paperclip icon to upload PDFs, Word documents, images, or text files directly into the conversation

Ask Claude to write, edit, summarise, explain, analyse, code, or research — it handles all of these within the same conversation

If the first response isn’t quite right, explain what you want changed — Claude follows up instructions well and adjusts without losing the context of what you asked before

For longer projects, use Claude as a thinking partner — paste in your draft, explain your goal, and ask it to critique, strengthen, or restructure your work

Free plan users can start conversations immediately — the free tier is generous enough to handle most daily tasks without hitting limits quickly

Key Features

Long context window — Claude can read and analyse very long documents, contracts, research papers, and codebases in a single conversation, making it particularly strong for detailed work

Nuanced writing — produces natural, well-structured writing that avoids the generic AI tone many tools default to

Honest about uncertainty — Claude tells you when it doesn’t know something or when a question is genuinely complicated, rather than confidently making something up

Strong reasoning — handles multi-step logic, complex analysis, and detailed explanations better than many general-purpose AI tools

Code assistance — writes, reviews, debugs, and explains code across most major programming languages

Document analysis — upload PDFs, spreadsheets, images, and text files and ask Claude to extract information, summarise, or answer questions based on the content

Safe and thoughtful responses — designed to handle sensitive topics carefully and avoid producing harmful, misleading, or irresponsible content

No memory between conversations by default — each new chat starts fresh, which protects privacy but means you’ll need to re-share context for new sessions

What Makes Claude Different From Other AI Assistants?

Most people discover Claude after feeling like ChatGPT or another AI tool gave them something close to what they needed — but not quite. The difference tends to show up in three specific situations:

When accuracy matters more than speed — Claude takes more care with factual claims and is more likely to flag uncertainty rather than fill gaps with plausible-sounding but incorrect information.

When the writing needs to sound human — Claude produces text that reads naturally and adapts well to different tones and styles. It’s less likely to produce the kind of overly structured, bullet-point-heavy output that sounds immediately like AI.

When the task is genuinely complex — multi-document analysis, long-form research, detailed code review, nuanced editing — Claude handles sustained, detailed work better than tools optimised for quick short responses.

Best For: Writers, researchers, analysts, developers, students, legal and finance professionals, anyone dealing with long or complex documents

Available Models in 2026:

  • Claude Haiku — fastest and lightest, ideal for quick tasks and high-volume use
  • Claude Sonnet — the balanced option, strong performance across most everyday tasks (available on the free plan)
  • Claude Opus — the most capable model, built for complex reasoning, detailed analysis, and demanding professional work

Pricing: Free plan available at claude.ai. Claude Pro from $20/month for higher usage limits and priority access to the most capable models.

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