Anthropic’s new Claude model can think both fast and slow

Another week, and there’s another new AI model ready for public use. This time, it’s Anthropic with the introduction of Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The company describes its latest release as the market’s first “hybrid reasoning model,” meaning the new version of Claude can both answer a question nearly instantaneously or take its time to work through it step by step. As the user you can decide what approach Claude takes, with a dropdown menu allowing you to select the “thinking mode” you want it to take.

“We’ve developed Claude 3.7 Sonnet with a different philosophy from other reasoning models on the market. Just as humans use a single brain for both quick responses and deep reflection, we believe reasoning should be an integrated capability of frontier models rather than a separate model entirely,” writes Anthropic. “This unified approach also creates a more seamless experience for users.”

Anthropic doesn’t name OpenAI explicitly, but the company is clearly taking a shot at its rival. Between GPT-4, o1, o1-mini and now o3-mini, OpenAI offers many different models, but unless you follow the company closely, the number of systems on offer can be overwhelming; in fact, Sam Altman recently admitted as much. “We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence,” he posted on X earlier this month.

Anthropic says it also took a different approach to developing Claude’s reasoning capabilities. “We’ve optimized somewhat less for math and computer science competition problems, and instead shifted focus towards real-world tasks that better reflect how businesses actually use LLMs,” the company writes. To that point, current Claude users can look forward to “particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development.”

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is available to use starting today across all Claude plans, including Anthropic’s free tier. Developers, meanwhile, can access the new model through the company’s API, Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

Speaking of developers, Anthropic is also introducing Claude Code, a new “agentic” tool that allows you to delegate coding tasks to Claude directly from a terminal interface. Available currently as a limited research preview, Anthropic says Claude Code can read code, edit files, write and run tests, and even push commits to GitHub.