Claude

Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant family. The 2026 lineup: Claude Opus 4.8 (most capable), Sonnet 4.6 (balanced), Haiku 4.5 (fast and cheap). Available via claude.ai (free + Pro at $20/month), the Anthropic API, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex. Strongest at: coding (Opus 4.8 leads SWE-Bench), long-form writing, document analysis up to 500k tokens. Anthropic's constitutional AI approach makes Claude feel more "thoughtful" than competitors, though somewhat slower for casual chat.