Anthropic’s Claude can now search the Internet in real time, allowing it to provide timely and relevant responses that are also more accurate than what the chatbot previously offered, according to the company. Claude incorporates direct citations for its Web-retrieved material, so users can fact-check its sources. “Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format.” While this is not exactly groundbreaking — ChatGPT, Grok 3, Copilot, Perplexity and Gemini all have real-time Web retrieval and most include citations — Claude takes a slightly different approach.

Unlike those other services, which seem to have real-time Web search “always on,” Claude will only use it when “you toggle on web search in profile settings and start a conversation with Claude 3.7 Sonnet,” Anthropic explains in a blog post that specifies Claude will only search the Web “when applicable” to inform its response. In other words, when looking for something that isn’t already existent in its training data.

That could wind up making its responses more focused, or conversely just adds another step. “Anthropic Claude just caught up with a ChatGPT feature from 2023 — but will it be accurate?,” asks Ars Technica, noting that even when the real-time Web feature is turned on, Claude will use it selectively, at its own discretion.

The feature is available as “feature preview” for paid subscribers to the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, “with plans to expand to the free tier and to more countries,” reports Fast Company.

The timing of this Claude 3 Sonnet update comes barely a month after Anthropic released its new hybrid reasoning model.

The update “comes at an important moment in the rapidly evolving AI sector,” according to VentureBeat, which suggests the move “reveals Anthropic’s determination to challenge OpenAI’s dominance in the consumer AI assistant market.”

While Claude has become more popular among technical users “for its nuanced reasoning and longer context window, the lack of real-time information access has been a significant handicap in head-to-head comparisons with ChatGPT,” VentureBeat notes, adding that “this update effectively neutralizes that disadvantage.”

Ars Technica calls Claude’s Web search feature “somewhat ‘agentic’ in the sense that it can autonomously loop through several attempts at searching the Web to drill down for an answer,” characterizing it as akin to “a very simplified version of the ‘Deep Research’ agent trend that recently came to Google Gemini and ChatGPT.”

Anthropic suggests business use cases for the Web-enabled Claude include: sales team trend analytics, financial assessments of market data, grant proposal research and comparison pricing by shoppers.