Amazon-backed Anthropic has launched its latest language model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, taking on the competition from ChatGPT, DeepSeek and others and even going one better with the launch of the first hybrid reasoning model. Anthropic took its first steps into AI agents with a new tool for developers called Claude Code.
Notably, Claude has shifted away from the traditional narrative of having a pre-trained model and a reasoning model independent of each other. Instead, the Dario Amodei led company has integrated the reasoning model alongside the frontier model, which means that users can just ask the chatbot when they want it to think longer before answering, essentially triggering the reasoning mode where it will self reflect before answering any query. Claude says that triggering the reasoning mode (or as they call it ‘extended thinking mode’) will help improve the model’s performance on math, physics, instruction following and coding along with many other tasks.
What are reasoning models? Why is it a big deal?
Reasoning models are a different kind of LLM (the force behind different chatbots), that are meant to mimic human like thinking in order to solve for more complex problems. The reasoning model, o1, was launched by OpenAI in September last year and since then there have been a flurry of these launches from the likes of Google, Grok and even DeepSeek.
Anthropic says its reasoning model is optimized less for math and computer science problems and more for solving real-world tasks. The company claimed that with its new models it will be able to maintain its ‘coding leadership’ in a highly competitive generative AI market.
It also showed some benchmarks where Claude 3.7 Sonnet scored much better in accuracy than its peers like OpenAI o-3 Mini (High) and DeepSeek R1.
However, unlike the offering from other AI models like Grok 3 reasoning, DeepSeek R1 or o3 Mini (limited bandwidth) that are free to use, Claude 3.7 Sonnet’s extended thinking mode will only be available to use for the company’s paying members. Meanwhile, free users do get access to the latest pre-trained model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
Anthropic developed its first-ever agentic tool:
Anthropic also announced its first agentic offering in a limited preview, Claude Code – a command line tool that is aimed at enabling developers to deleage their substantial engineering tasks directly from their terminal. Claude says it has improved the coding experience on its website but its Github extension is also available on all plans, allowing developers to connect their coding repositories directly to the chatbot.
The company says Claude Code can ‘search and read code, edit files, write and run tests, commit and push code to GitHub, and use command line tools’ while the keeping the users in loop at every step.
