March 23, 2025 Anthropic has announced that its AI assistant, Claude, now possesses real-time web search capabilities, enabling it to access and process up-to-date information from the internet. Although reports are that this feature is currently available to paid users in the United States, with plans to expand access in the near future, we were able to get it on the unpaid public version in Canada.

Although many users would claim that Claude was superior in some functions – writing prose and even coding – one of the biggest drawbacks of Claude, was that it relied solely on pre-existing training data unlike OpenAI that could dynamically retrieve and synthesize the latest information available online.

This advancement significantly enhances Claude’s accuracy and relevance, particularly for tasks requiring current data. To promote transparency and allow users to verify information, Claude provides direct citations to its sources.

This development positions Claude as a more formidable competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has offered similar web search functionalities.

Another function that Claude seems to have added is the ability to not just produce the code to create graphics, but it will also display them to you. So far, in our experience, the graphical capabilities are fairly primitive compared to OpenAI and certainly aren’t anywhere near those of Google’s Gemini.

There are recent announcements that Claude will soon include voice mode as it attempts to play catchup with OpenAI.

The introduction of real-time web search is anticipated to significantly enhance Claude’s utility across various applications, from enterprise decision-making to everyday information retrieval, marking a substantial step forward in the evolution of AI assistants.