Claude chatbot gets web search upgrade for U.S. users and doubles token limit

Anthropic has announced a significant upgrade to its chatbot, adding web search capabilities for paid users in the U.S.

The “feature preview” is part of the latest update to Claude, which users can enable in their profiles. The product lead for Claude, Scott White, said it’ll be available to free users and other countries soon.

The integration means Claude will be able to pull on current data from the internet, which will be useful for tasks that require up-to-date information. It’ll also include citations so users can check the sources themselves.

In a demonstration, White showed off the ability to build a web app by asking Claude to do so. The answer included links to sources, as well as the answer itself.

Demand for web search in Claude has been high and some users have even created workarounds to get the feature prior to this update.

White said the reason it took so long to implement web search was because it was “non-trivial” to integrate it with the model. He added that operating these features is more expensive than running a traditional search engine, but there are no plans to pass that cost on to users.

The difficulty with implementing AI search is because of the unpredictable nature of probabilistic language models. They can be accurate one moment and completely off the next, so there’s no guarantee the results would be reliable enough to serve up.

Claude isn’t just getting a web search. The new features also include the ability for Pro tier users to process up to 200,000 tokens at a time. That doubles the previous limit and surpasses GPT-4’s ceiling of 32,000 tokens. This means users could upload entire codebases or entire novels for analysis.

Claude can also now use customizable tools for specific tasks like web searching or doing calculations. Users can also provide persistent custom instructions to help tailor the chatbot’s responses.