Claude gets free iPhone app and new Team plan for businesses

What's new

Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, has launched an app for iPhone and iPad. It is free to download from the App Store, including for those who have a paid subscription. A new subscription plan for workplaces, called Team, also arrived at the same time.

On May 14, 2024, Anthropic announced that Claude.ai, the free iOS app and the Team plan are available in Europe. Denmark is not mentioned specifically in the sources, which only say "Europe" and name France, Germany, Spain and Italy separately. There is no Android app yet. Android users can use the web version.

What's smart

The app syncs your conversations between web and mobile, so you can start a conversation on your computer and pick it up on your phone. You can take a photo with the camera or choose one from your photo library, and Claude can analyze it and understand what is in it, such as objects and surroundings. You can also upload documents and have them summarized or transcribed.

The Team plan offers higher usage limits, access to all three Claude 3 models (Opus, Sonnet and Haiku), admin tools and priority access to the servers. It has a context window of 200,000 tokens. A context window is how much text the AI can handle at once, and tokens are small chunks of text.

Anthropic has announced more collaboration features "in the coming weeks": citations so users can verify AI answers, integrations with things like codebases and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and shared work on AI-generated documents. These are plans, not something that was in place at launch.

Cheaper or better?

The app is free. Free users get access to the Sonnet model with modest quotas. Claude Pro cost $20 a month in the US and gives access to the most powerful model, Claude 3 Opus, on all devices. According to Anthropic, as reported by The Register, Pro offers about five times as much usage as the free version. In Europe, Pro costs EUR 18 a month plus VAT.

Team costs $30 per user per month in the US, with a minimum of five seats. In Europe the price is EUR 28 plus VAT per user per month, also with a minimum of five seats. The sources do not give prices in Danish kroner.

According to The Register's own traffic analysis, which is not an official disclosure, free accounts have a limit of 25,000 tokens and a response cap of 4,096 tokens, compared with 190,000 tokens for Pro.

Against its competitors, Claude is behind on mobile. OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini already had iPhone apps, and ChatGPT's iOS app arrived almost a year before Claude's. Tech.co and 9to5Mac therefore see the launch as a catch-up move. Tech.co expects an Android app to come later, as happened with ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Meta released Llama 3, which according to The Register outperforms comparable Claude models on certain benchmarks (standardized tests).

What it's good for

The app suits anyone who wants an AI assistant in their pocket: ask about a photo, get a long document summarized or continue a conversation from your computer. Anthropic highlights that Claude has strong comprehension and fluent language skills in French, German, Spanish and Italian, among others. Danish is not mentioned.

The Team plan is for small and medium-sized workplaces with at least five employees who want shared access to the most powerful models, more room for long documents and user administration. Prices and plans may have changed since the launch in May 2024.