Claude’s Meteoric Rise: Will Anthropic’s AI Star Burn Out or Dominate?

Claude’s Meteoric Rise: Will Anthropic’s AI Star Burn Out or Dominate?

Anthropic’s Claude has rocketed from newcomer to major player in the artificial intelligence field in just a few years. First released to select partners in late 2022, Claude has quickly evolved through multiple versions, each more capable than the last. The AI assistant began with a 9,000 token context window, already exceeding GPT-4’s 8,000 tokens.

Claude 2 arrived in July 2023, bringing the technology to a wider audience. By August of that year, Claude Instant 1.2 launched with better math, coding, and reasoning abilities. November brought Claude 2.1 with a massive 200,000 token context window—enough to process about 500 pages of text at once.

Claude’s rapid evolution expanded capabilities while reaching more users, culminating in a game-changing 200,000 token context window.

Access to Claude has expanded steadily since launch. Initially limited to partners like Notion, Quora, and DuckDuckGo, Claude became available to individuals through a $20 monthly subscription called Claude Pro in September 2023. The service also joined Amazon Bedrock in August 2023, attracting corporate clients like LexisNexis and Ricoh USA. Anthropic’s commitment to building AI that is helpful, honest, and harmless underlies all of Claude’s design decisions.

Companies have found diverse uses for Claude. It powers Notion AI for writing tasks, helps Sourcegraph with code completion, and assists NASA—where Claude 3.7 even planned paths for the Perseverance Mars rover in 2025. Despite ChatGPT’s dominant market share position of nearly 60%, Claude has shown remarkable growth in the rapidly expanding AI assistant landscape.

The Claude 4 family, released in May 2025, marked Anthropic’s biggest technical leap forward. Later that year, Claude Opus 4.5 pushed benchmark scores past the 80-mark average, designed specifically for agentic workflows where the AI can perform multiple tasks independently. This version also introduced the innovative Infinite Chats feature that effectively eliminated previous context window limitations.

Internal usage shows Claude’s growing autonomy. The AI now handles 20 autonomous actions compared to just 10 six months earlier. Engineers increasingly use Claude as their first resource for coding questions, reducing their need to interrupt colleagues.

With the release of Claude for Chrome in August 2025 and partnerships with Microsoft and Databricks, Anthropic continues to expand Claude’s reach. The AI has evolved from a simple assistant to a tool that enables work outside users’ core expertise, with 27% of Claude-assisted projects representing work that wouldn’t happen otherwise.