Anthropic vs. OpenAI: What's the Difference?

Anthropic and OpenAI are two of the largest generative AI industry leaders, but they take unique approaches to ethics, safety, and application. While Anthropic's mission is to be an AI safety and research company that builds "reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems" [1], OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company whose "mission is to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity" [2].

Choosing when to use Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT depends on how you use generative AI. Keep reading to learn more about Anthropic versus OpenAI, including their advantages, disadvantages, and things to consider before choosing which to use.

What is Anthropic?

Founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and other former OpenAI researchers, Anthropic is an AI public benefit corporation that specializes in AI safety and research.

Though Anthropic strives to create conversational AI that is powerful and capable of handling complex queries and tasks, its overarching objective is to ensure its large language model Claude is also an ethical AI. To this end, the multidisciplinary team at Anthropic conducts extensive research into how an AI's mind works. By positioning itself as an industry expert in generative AI safety and research, Anthropic strives to create secure, trustworthy, and reliable AI.

To ensure Claude remains an ethical AI, its team of researchers and engineers employ a method called constitutional AI.

Built on a foundation of human-generated rules and ethics, this method uses successive fine-tuning of AI models to generate more ethical outputs each time. In practice, the AI model constantly checks its output against its human-directed ethical guidelines.

What is Anthropic used for?

Anthropic's flagship conversational AI, Claude 3.5, is used for tasks that involve advanced reasoning, vision analysis, code generation, and multilingual processing. You can access Claude through an application programming interface (API), an Android or iOS app, or Claude's web interface.

Running at twice the speed of its predecessor Claude 3 Opus, 3.5 Sonnet allows you to generate code snippets, make sense of graphs, and design a new website in real time via its Artifacts feature. As Claude generates artifacts—code snippets or website designs, for example—these generated outputs show up as a window alongside your conversation.

This new layout creates an environment of greater collaboration with AI. Sonnet becomes an interactive workspace because you can edit and add to Claude's real-time outputs.

Imagine you decided to open a small cafe and coffee roastery. By uploading your sales and marketing data directly to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, you can analyze and forecast trends, discover your customers' preferences, and determine the best product mix for your fresh-roasted coffee beans.

Advantages of Anthropic

Anthropic's Claude AI is built with accuracy, safety, and reliability in mind. By conducting exhaustive research into how the large language model thinks and reasons, Anthropic has far more control over how its model responds.

In practice, you're less likely to encounter inappropriate, unethical, or untruthful outputs. While you should always double-check your AI's outputs, Claude claims hallucinations—confident statements of factual inaccuracies as fact—are less common, and accuracy is reliable even in large documents.

Finally, because Anthropic trains Claude using constitutional AI methodologies, Claude adheres to a set of ethical AI guidelines. Theoretically, Claude's outputs will be less biased toward a specific political or social end of the spectrum.

Disadvantages of Anthropic

While Claude 3.5 Sonnet can interpret images and extract text and meaning from those images, it cannot generate them like ChatGPT can using its image model DALL·E3. If your project requires AI image or video generation, you'll have to use another AI or manually create those images and videos.

Natively, Claude 3.5 Sonnet also does not have real-time access to the internet. While this creates a distraction-free, safe AI workspace, you cannot use Claude 3.5 Sonnet for real-time research. However, Sonnet can still help you develop new web designs, draft reports, and interpret graphs.

What is OpenAI?

Founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Elon Musk, and others, OpenAI is an AI research company that primarily focuses on the development, deployment, and safety of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

In contrast to Anthropic, OpenAI offers a line of generative AI products, including DALL·E, Codex, ChatGPT, and Whisper. CLIP describes images, while OpenAI's API enables developers to interact and test use cases across all of OpenAI's conversational AI products.

What is OpenAI used for?

By leveraging features in OpenAI products, you can perform research, create content, generate images, translate languages, build chatbots, analyze data, automate repetitive processes, and more.

ChatGPT allows you to perform light research, summarize documents, make sense of calculus, and extract information from charts and diagrams. Because OpenAI has integrated DALL·E, Codex, CLIP, and Whisper into the ChatGPT mobile app and web interface, you can seamlessly access these AI tools as needed.

DALL·E can create custom art for your cafe, too. By typing a detailed prompt that includes the aesthetic, camera angles, and general description of the image you want to create, you can tailor the custom art to fit your cafe's aesthetic.

If you need to build an app or design a webpage from scratch in HTML and CSS, you can use Codex. Type in a detailed prompt, and Codex will take your input and generate lines of code.

Finally, with OpenAI's newest model, GPT-4, you have real-time web access, meaning every assertion of fact has links to sources. This lets you perform cursory research on a topic, with the option to delve deeper into the source links.

Advantages of OpenAI

OpenAI's broad range of conversational AI products means you'll have access to tools that can make learning, writing, working, and creating easier and more streamlined. Because OpenAI's mission is to make its conversational AIs accessible to a broad audience, you can easily access the full suite of OpenAI's products through the API, its web interface, or via the Android and iOS mobile apps.

Disadvantages of OpenAI

OpenAI's conversational AIs are trained through reinforcement learning or reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). While this ensures the AI does what humans want or need, it can bias the AI's outputs.

RLHF relies on human annotators/evaluators to be attentive, honest, and consistent. It also assumes that the AI model has no ulterior motives, won't game the system to maximize reward, and thoroughly completes the desired task as instructed.

However, as of January 2024, OpenAI funded several teams to develop ways to democratically govern AI. According to OpenAI's official blog, "As AI gets more advanced and widely used, it is essential to involve the public in deciding how AI should behave⁠ in order to better align⁠ our models to the values of humanity" [3].

Anthropic vs. OpenAI: Other considerations

Whether to use Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's suite of generative AI tools depends entirely on your use case. Generally speaking, Claude is good for:

• Content ideation

• Brainstorming

• Interpreting graphs

• Extracting data from uploaded images

• Drafting preliminary pieces of text, like reports or essays

OpenAI's conversational AIs are good for:

• Brainstorming

• Content ideation

• Cursory research on topics of interest

• Image generation and creation

• Real-time, voice-based conversations via Whisper

• Image descriptions and data extraction via CLIP

• Multilingual coding via Codex

Ultimately, it's not an either-or decision. As you explore these conversational AIs in greater depth, you might decide that one is better for drafting an essay while the other is better for extracting data from and summarizing a profit-and-loss account. Experiment with Anthropic's and OpenAI's conversational AI tools to determine which ones fit your needs best.

Getting started with AI on Coursera

Anthropic and OpenAI take two distinct approaches to AI's future. Anthropic strongly emphasizes ethical AI and helpful generative conversational AI. In contrast, OpenAI offers a broadly accessible suite of generative AI products and takes a more democratic approach to ethics and AI values.

If you're curious about incorporating AI into your project management duties, you'll find a Specialization from Vanderbilt University on Coursera. The ChatGPT for Project Management Specialization can empower you with the tools to:

• Incorporate ChatGPT into your project management tasks

• Use ChatGPT and other AIs to simplify project planning

• Conduct better meetings

However, if you're looking for a broader overview of generative AI, the Generative AI Fundamentals Specialization from IBM on Coursera can empower you with the core AI concepts you'll need to:

• Understand the difference between generative AI and other types of AI

• Learn how to apply generative AI in daily life

• Learn about and apply different prompt engineering techniques to get the most from AI

• Gain a thorough grasp of different AI platforms

• Gain awareness of all the ethical issues around generative AI

• Gain the skills to apply AI to all facets of your career