Anthropic Debuts Version of Claude AI Model for Higher Education

Anthropic has unveiled a version of its Claude AI model designed for higher education institutions.

Claude for Education, announced Wednesday (April 2), lets universities come up with and implement artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled approaches to teaching, learning and administration.

“Claude for Education gives academic institutions secure, reliable AI access for their entire community,” Anthropic said in a news release.

For instance, the release added, “students can draft literature reviews with proper citations, work through calculus problems with step-by-step guidance, and get feedback on thesis statements before final submission.”

Professors, meanwhile, can “create rubrics aligned to specific learning outcomes, provide individualized feedback on student essays efficiently, and generate chemistry equations with varying difficulty levels.”

Administrators can do things like analyze enrollment trends across departments or automate email responses to common inquiries.

Claude for Education includes Anthropic’s Learning mode, designed to encourage independent thinking. Rather than generating immediate answers, this mode asks students “How would you approach this problem?”

In addition to the launch, Anthropic also announced “full campus access agreements” with Northeastern University, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Champlain College, making Claude available to all students at these schools.

PYMNTS explored the use of AI in education in an interview last year with Ryan Lufkin, global vice president of strategy at the education technology company Instructure. He described how the technology helped him bolster his Spanish skills for presentations in Latin America.

“I started experimenting with using some of the generative AI tools for translation, and I was surprised at how much better the outcomes were,” he said. “AI just understands the contexts and responds with more natural language that fits the situation.”

As the pace of change speeds up, Lufkin argued that companies must cultivate a mindset of lifelong learning among employees. Still, he acknowledged that there is still fear around AI due to popular cultural depictions.

“A whole generation was conditioned to fear AI through movies like War Games and Terminator,” Lufkin said. “If we can get past that fear and understand the power and shortcomings of AI, we can harness that potential much more broadly.”

Meanwhile, Anthropic said recently that it was more interested in developing generalist foundation models for enterprise use cases than for building hardware or consumer entertainment offerings.

Speaking at the HumanX conference last month, Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger said the startup was focused on balancing research breakthroughs with practical product development.

“We want to help people get work done, whether it’s code, whether it’s knowledge work, etc.,” he said. “And then you can then imagine different manifestations of that” in applications for the consumer, small business and all the way to large corporations and the C-suite.