Claude
FreemiumAnthropic's assistant with Projects, memory, connectors and Cowork; the thinking partner side of the AI OS.
What it is
Claude is Anthropic's assistant, available on the web, as desktop apps and on iOS and Android. The line on the site is "brainstorm in chat, build in Cowork". In chat you get long-context reading, writing and editing, code and data visualizations, web search, file creation with code execution, extended thinking for hard problems, and memory that carries context between conversations. Projects group chats and documents around one piece of work with their own instructions; connectors bring in Slack, Google Workspace and remote MCP servers so the assistant can read your actual data. Cowork is the desktop mode where Claude works through multi-step tasks in your files and apps rather than answering a single prompt.
The site lists a Free plan, Pro (which includes Claude Code, Cowork and the Design and Science variants) and Max with five to twenty times the Pro usage.
Where it fits in the AI OS
Personal & corporate AI OS, the front door. Claude Code is where work gets built; Claude is where it gets thought through: reading a contract, shaping a spec, arguing with a plan, drafting the message you are avoiding. With connectors and memory it becomes the layer that knows your company, and the corporate questions (who can connect what, what is retained, what it costs) start here.
Insider notes
membersHow Serge's stack uses it
The project's design canvas is built with Claude Design and published as an artifact the team edits in a GUI, and the specs, research and review reports in the repository are produced in Claude sessions. Which Projects, connectors or memory settings Serge runs day to day is not documented publicly.
[SERGE: fill in]
Setup in 5 minutes
- Sign up, install the desktop app, turn on memory in Settings.
- Create a Project for your company; paste your positioning, tone and the three decisions you keep re-explaining into its instructions.
- Add the Google Drive or Slack connector and ask a question you know the answer to, to see how it retrieves.
- Enable extended thinking for one hard question; compare.
- Try Cowork on a folder of files with a task that has three steps.
Alternatives
- ChatGPT — the same category from OpenAI, with its own memory, projects and agent mode.
- Gemini — deep integration with Google Workspace.
- Perplexity — if search-grounded answers are the main need.
- Local models via Ollama — private, free, weaker; fine for routine tasks.