Meet Claude, ChatGPT's cooler little brother. Built by safety‑focused startup Anthropic, Claude 3 (the current release) still flies under most people's radar, yet many users who try it say its replies feel more natural and polite than ChatGPT's—and it remembers far more of the conversation at once.
While ChatGPT dominates the headlines, Claude has quietly built a loyal following among professionals who value thoughtful responses, longer context windows, and enterprise-grade compliance features. It's the AI assistant that doesn't just answer questions—it remembers the entire conversation.
Why the chat feels smoother
Claude can juggle up to 200 000 tokens of context—roughly 500 pages of text—so it keeps earlier details alive instead of asking you to repeat yourself. In practice that means fewer "Sorry, what were we talking about?" moments when drafting long documents or troubleshooting code.
It's designed to be "helpful, harmless, and honest"
Anthropic trains Claude with a method they call Constitutional AI: the model reviews its own answers against a written set of safety rules before responding. The result is a tone many users describe as thoughtful rather than salesy or robotic.
Privacy and compliance win fans in big companies
Claude runs under SOC 2 Type II controls on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud. Anthropic offers no‑training clauses by default and short data‑retention windows—features legal and healthcare teams have been begging for.
Price is competitive, too
Mid‑tier Claude 3 Sonnet costs about $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, roughly on par with GPT‑4o but with the advantage of that larger memory window—handy when you're feeding in entire policy manuals or patient histories.
Where Claude quietly shines
- Long contract reviews: Paste multiple NDAs, MSAs, and schedules in one go; ask for conflicts or risk clauses
- Research memos: Dump dozens of articles, then chat with Claude as it links themes across the full stack of sources
- Customer‑support summaries: Give it an entire ticket history and receive a concise, context‑aware response plan
How to try it
- Personal use: claude.ai (free tier plus paid Pro)
- Business use: Amazon Bedrock or Google Cloud Vertex AI for private, no‑training deployments
- Integrations: Slack's Claude app, Notion AI (under the hood), and a growing list of SaaS tools
Bottom line. If ChatGPT is the household name, Claude is the under‑the‑radar sibling many users end up preferring—thanks to its longer memory, gentler conversational style, and built‑in compliance features. Worth a spin, especially if you work with long documents or in a regulated industry.