What is Claude

Claude has built a strong reputation around careful writing, long-context work, structured reasoning, and a calm, dependable user experience. Teams often shortlist Claude when they care about quality of output, document-heavy workflows, and a product that feels less noisy than many AI alternatives.

Claude comes from Anthropic, which was founded in 2021 and quickly built its reputation around AI safety, clear reasoning, and dependable writing quality. Since launching Claude publicly, Anthropic has expanded from a respected lab into one of the most important commercial AI vendors for businesses that care about trust, long-context work, and careful output.

Core offerings

  • Claude chat for writing, drafting, research, analysis, and internal knowledge work.
  • API access for product teams and developers.
  • A model family that spans higher-end reasoning and premium quality down to faster, cheaper options.
  • Team and enterprise plans for workspace management and broader rollout.

Pricing

As of July 18, 2026, Anthropic’s help centre lists Claude Pro at US$20 per month. The current plan guide also lists Max 5x at US$100 per month and Max 20x at US$200 per month. Team pricing is listed at US$25 per member per month when billed annually or US$30 per member per month billed monthly, with a five-seat minimum. API pricing publicly lists Claude Sonnet 4 at US$3 per million input tokens and US$15 per million output tokens, while Claude Opus 4.1 is listed at US$15 input and US$75 output per million tokens.

Model footprint

Anthropic’s public pricing currently covers the Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku families. That is a smaller public family structure than some marketplaces, but it is easier to understand and often easier to govern.

Why select Claude

Claude is a strong option for organisations that care about writing quality, reasoning quality, long-context document analysis, and a cleaner product surface. It is often especially attractive for policy, legal, research, operations, and internal knowledge workflows.

Official sources: Claude plans, Claude Team billing, Anthropic API pricing.

Current models

Anthropic publishes current pricing clearly, but many model-card style fields such as training data specifics and most cut-off dates are not publicly disclosed in the same structured way as OpenAI.

ModelContext / outputKnowledge / trainingPricing / token useSpeed / notes Claude Opus 4.1Context not published in the pricing table
Long-context premium pricing applies on supported modelsKnowledge cutoff: not publicly disclosed in pricing docs
Training data: not publicly disclosedUS$15 input / US$18.75 5m cache write / US$30 1h cache write / US$1.50 cache read / US$75 output per 1M tokensMost capable and expensive Claude line for complex reasoning and codingClaude Opus 4Context not published in the pricing tableKnowledge cutoff: not publicly disclosed
Training data: not publicly disclosedUS$15 input / US$18.75 5m cache write / US$30 1h cache write / US$1.50 cache read / US$75 output per 1M tokensPremium Claude tier immediately below Opus 4.1Claude Sonnet 41M token context window is in beta when enabled for eligible organisationsKnowledge cutoff: not publicly disclosed
Training data: not publicly disclosedUS$3 input / US$3.75 5m cache write / US$6 1h cache write / US$0.30 cache read / US$15 output per 1M tokensHigh-performance Claude tier with the clearest efficiency/performance balanceClaude Sonnet 3.7Context not published in the pricing tableKnowledge cutoff: not publicly disclosed
Training data: not publicly disclosedUS$3 input / US$3.75 5m cache write / US$6 1h cache write / US$0.30 cache read / US$15 output per 1M tokensStill live and competitively priced for broad reasoning workClaude Haiku 3.5Context not published in the pricing tableKnowledge cutoff: not publicly disclosed
Training data: not publicly disclosedUS$0.80 input / US$1 5m cache write / US$1.6 1h cache write / US$0.08 cache read / US$4 output per 1M tokensFastest and cheapest current Claude model in the public pricing table