Anthropic Announces Europe Release for Claude AI Chatbot

Amazon-backed Anthropic will officially be releasing its Claude artificial intelligence chatbot in Europe this Tuesday. The AI chatbot will be available in all of its renditions, Claude Pro and Claude 3 Opus, accessible via an iPhone application and through the web.

Additionally, Anthropic is introducing its business-oriented Claude Team subscription-based services, which, before value-added tax (VAT), run 28 euros ($30) per month.

Although Claude.ai is currently freely accessible in the United Kingdom on mobile and the web, according to Anthropic, this is the first time the product has been made available to users in the EU and non-EU nations, including Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland.

As of March, investors valued Anthropic at a staggering $18.4 billion, making it one of the most talked about and buzzed-about generative AI businesses on the market.

Amazon stated the same month that it will invest an additional $2.75 billion in the business, bringing its total investment in the company to $4 billion.

Anthropic just recently released a Claude 3 application for the AI chatbot, Chats conducted using the web-based chatbot and those conducted through the new Claude iPhone app will be synchronized.

The computer will also be able to analyze photographs, including user-taken ones, which will enable the chatbot to perform tasks like image recognition.

The iOS app allows users to use limited functions for free. However, according to the support materials, the application offers a $20 monthly Pro subscription that gives customers at least five times the free service usage.

According to Anthropic estimates, pro-tier users can submit 45 messages, or about 200 English phrases (15-20 words each), every five hours before restrictions kick in. No precise word count is given to indicate how much material this is.

Using Proxyman for iOS, I conducted a quick traffic audit of the Claude app and found that Anthropic has a strict limit of 25,000 characters for the free version and 190,000 characters for the Pro tier default values.

The free tier also seems subject to the 4096 token creation cap. A token's typical composition consists of four English characters.

UK Investigations on Amazon and Anthropic

Regulators in the UK are evaluating whether Microsoft's agreements with generative AI companies and Amazon's investment and collaboration with Anthropic represent successful mergers that could reduce competition.

According to Amazon, their collaboration with Anthropic is not a merger but a restricted corporate investment. Microsoft disputes that the hiring of Inflection is the same as merging with OpenAI and Mistral, two AI companies.

The Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) quick investigation reportedly demonstrates the regulator's increased attention to important US technology businesses and efforts to address antitrust issues.

UK on Antitrust

The CMA postponed Activision Blizzard's takeover by Microsoft for several months last year. The original authorities feared the merger would drastically reduce competition.

The CMA approved the acquisition after Microsoft granted Ubisoft cloud rights to all current and former Activision titles.

According to earlier reports, the CMA started investigating the merger of Vodafone and Three UK just this March, which led Vodafone's CEO to demand regulatory reform and industry involvement.

The CMA worries that the merger, by uniting two of the top mobile network providers in the UK, could alter market dynamics. With 27 million customers, the combined company would become the biggest mobile phone provider in the UK.

Following an initial investigation, the CMA raised issues with the merger's potential effects on consumer welfare and competition, including higher mobile service prices and less investment in UK mobile networks.

(Photo: Tech Times)