Anthropic has launched a paid tier catering to business customers as well as a free mobile app for iOS users featuring its chatbot Claude. The generative AI startup — which has backing from Amazon, Google and Salesforce — is positioning itself to compete with companies like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft that focus on enterprise plans for revenue while also offering individual plans. Anthropic’s Team plan starts at $30 per user per month, on par with competing enterprise products, and requires a minimum of five seats. Anthropic has been beta testing Team over the past few quarters in industries including legal, tech and healthcare.

Anthropic President Daniela Amodei — who co-founded the company with her brother Dario, who is CEO — told CNBC in an interview that customers had been requesting a dedicated enterprise product, explaining that feedback indicated “people are kind of using Claude at the office already.”

The Team plan provides access to its latest family of models, Claude 3, offered in configurations dubbed Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, which give “teams and business users a suite of cutting-edge AI models tailored for different use cases,” Anthropic explains in a news announcement.

The company also offers free and $20 per month Pro access for individuals.

Team users get admin tools, billing management and a 200K context window. The latter “enables businesses to process long documents (e.g., research papers, legal contracts), discuss complex topics (financial forecasting, product roadmapping) and maintain multi-step conversations (for customer support, project planning),” according to Anthropic.

Anthropic says Opus, the most advanced Claude 3 model, “outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate-level knowledge, graduate-level reasoning and basic mathematics,” according to CNBC.

ZDNet calls Anthropic “OpenAI’s main closed-source competitor,” and says it “plans to add more collaboration features to the Team plan ‘in the coming weeks,’ including integration with third-party customer relationship management (CRM) systems.”

Claude for iOS is available from Apple’s App Store “for free and paid users of Claude,” notes Bloomberg, adding that mobile conversations “will synchronize with those conducted via the web-based version of the chatbot,” which performs image recognition. Amodei told CNBC, “we actually just hired our first Android engineer, so we are actively working on the Android app.”

Bloomberg says that since its 2021 launch Anthropic has “become one of OpenAI’s most formidable competitors, raising billions in funding from investors” and attracting business customers including Pfizer and conversational search engine Perplexity AI.