OpenAI Rival Anthropic Targets New Industries

SAN JOSE (California), Feb 6 (Bernama-dpa) -- OpenAI rival Anthropic is expanding the capabilities of its Claude AI software into additional areas as competition among AI developers intensifies, reported German news agency dpa.

With the new version, Claude Opus 4.6, the AI will also be able to carry out financial analysis tasks, Anthropic said on Thursday. To do so, Claude can evaluate company data, mandatory disclosures and market information, the company explained.

Shares in some financial analytics firms fell sharply following the presentation of the new AI software. 

Just last week, Anthropic triggered a sell-off in shares of companies offering traditional legal software after launching an AI product tailored to legal services.

According to Anthropic, Claude Opus 4.6 has also improved its ability to identify security flaws in software. 

The company said the AI had discovered more than 500 previously unknown critical vulnerabilities in collections of open-source programmes.

Anthropic has, however, also warned that cyberattackers are increasingly using AI to carry out their attacks.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT creator OpenAI released an upgraded version of its coding-focused AI software at roughly the same time. The company said GPT-5.3 Codex was the first model to have been significantly involved in its own development.

OpenAI and Anthropic are competing to embed their AI software across companies and government agencies. The industry is currently focusing on so-called AI agents, which are designed to independently complete multi-step tasks.

AI has already transformed software development. Whereas programmers once wrote most code manually, large portions of code are now generated by AI and reviewed by human developers.

--BERNAMA-dpa