Anthropic adds web search to its Claude chatbot

Anthropic’s AI-powered chatbot, Claude, can now search the web — a capability that had long eluded it.

Web search is available now in preview for paid Claude users in the U.S., Anthropic said on its blog, with support for free users and additional countries coming soon. Users can toggle on web search in their profile settings from the Claude web app, and Claude will automatically search across sites to inform certain responses.

For now, web search only works with the latest Anthropic model powering Claude, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Anthropic said.

“When Claude incorporates information from the web into its responses, it provides direct citations so you can easily fact-check sources,” the company wrote in its blog post. “Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format. This enhancement expands Claude’s extensive knowledge base with real-time insights, providing answers based on more current information.”

Claude’s ability to search the web brings it to feature parity with most rival AI-powered chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Mistral’s Le Chat. Anthropic’s argument against it, previously, was that Claude was “designed to be self-contained.” No doubt competitive pressures had something to do with the reversal in course.