Simplicity is essential in the legal world, and few know this better than an assistant who spent two years at Jorge Morel’s firm, which advises 400 technology companies in Spain and Latin America. His name is Claude and he is an AI chatbot created by a former ChatGPT developer at the startup Anthropic. A 43-year-old lawyer from the Spanish island of Mallorca says, “While other AIs embellish sentences and cause confusion, AI writes accurately with fewer words.” In five minutes, Claude can draft the infamous “Terms of Service,” a 10-page document that’s all over the Internet even though no one reads it. “It would take a human two hours,” Morrell added.
The chatbot’s French name has been popping up everywhere in recent days. Not just because it advertised during last Sunday’s coveted Super Bowl slot, but because updates to improve its legal aid capabilities caused an unusual shock in the market. $1 trillion in market value has evaporated from the US software sector. Powerhouse Adobe lost 15%. But Claude started long before that.
Anthropic’s chatbot was launched in March 2023 and has been popular with Morell and many entrepreneurs in various fields over the years due to its focus on practical applications. But for the stock market, this was a revelation moment about a branch of AI that is far less well-known than large-scale language models and far less ambitious than artificial general intelligence, but with a clear purpose and specific uses.
What is Claude?
On the surface, chatbots are similar to other models. Respond conversationally to simple natural language instructions or text, audio, or video files. Their roots are different. Rather than selling agents to the general public, Anthropic trained its models to perform specific tasks for businesses. It provides specialized functions such as sales management, advertising, customer service, and legal assistance.
Claude also has an Excel add-on that allows businesses to create, analyze, modify, or automatically update spreadsheets. If Microsoft’s program reduced the need for programming knowledge, Anthropic’s tools have done the same for spreadsheets. For example, with plain language instructions, Claude can instantly update the company’s overall financial plan based on potential interest rate increases or changes in input prices. Alternatively, you can create a sheet from scratch using publicly available data.
“You’ll notice benefits in the most typical day-to-day tasks of a company, such as writing, editing, and programming,” says Morel. In fact, in addition to legal and financial applications, Claude also includes specialized models to assist with computer programming. One is for professional developers, called Code, and the other, new for January, is a simplified version of Cowork that doesn’t require you to write a single line of code.
What is it used for?
For the past year, Spanish entrepreneurs Manuel López Rivero, 54, and Manuel López Aragón, 18, have been using Claude, specifically its code version. Father and son Manuel run a company that develops enterprise applications in Santa Cruz de la Palma, Spain’s Canary Islands.
“We used to spend years and thousands of euros on developers, but now we can complete it in about three months,” says the son. Around the same time, the two just launched a platform for finding and hiring staff for event organizations.
Anthropic’s chatbot also allows entrepreneurs to respond quickly. When the European Commission approved a series of amendments to the Digital Act late last year, Morel created an interactive calculator to help entrepreneurs understand the new rules.
“This was a way to make somewhat complex regulations easier to understand,” Morrell explains. The tool, integrated into his company’s website, allows companies developing high-risk AI systems, such as those used in biotech, to simulate when certain provisions of the regulation will begin to apply.
Is Claude popular?
As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a message to employees, “ChatGPT is AI for most people,” but entrepreneurs aren’t part of that group. In the business world, the situation is completely different. Anthropic, which plans to go public this year, has raised more than $60 billion in previous funding rounds and is valued at $380 billion, with backing from giants like Google. This is almost a third of OpenAI, but still a very large number.
With three paid subscription plans and one free tier (the latter has a daily usage limit), Claude is trained using a method in which developers define principles that guide the system as if it were a constitution, rather than relying solely on user interaction.
This approach forces the model to prioritize clear, direct answers rather than simply trying to please, which often tends to be misleading. “Claude’s ramblings have decreased, which is important in business,” Morel says.
What does the future hold for software?
Claude’s emergence beyond the business world comes at a time of increasing market turmoil as investors fret over how tech companies will profit from technology whose costs continue to rise. In this context, Anthropic has an advantage and, unlike its competitors, it has already projected profitability from 2028. Revenue in 2025 will be over $9 billion, half that of OpenAI, but more than double what was expected at the end of the first half. Growth is accelerating. Anthropic accounts for 40% of enterprise AI spending, compared to 30% for OpenAI, according to an HSBC study late last year.
In the stock market, major data and analytics software companies, including S&P Global, the world’s leading credit rating agency, and Moody’s fell 15%. FactSet, another giant in business data analytics, plunged nearly 30%.
Despite the blow, analysts insist the sector will adapt and hold on. “While we expect some short-term relief following the recent wave of selling, dispersion across companies is likely to widen further depending on the extent to which AI can disrupt business models,” Citi said in a note last week.
JP Morgan echoes this sentiment: “While the rapid evolution of AI is a legitimate concern for the software industry, current investor sentiment may be overly pessimistic. Despite weak sector fundamentals, limited insider buying, and stagnant hiring, our CIO survey results do not suggest that the death of the broader software industry is imminent.” They already know who to turn to to review their plans.
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