Artificial intelligence company Anthropic recently announced that it will open to Claude users who have not subscribed to a paid plan a number of advanced features that were originally only available to paying users, including file creation and editing, third-party service connectors, and skills (Skills) capabilities. This move comes just after the main competitor OpenAI announced that it will push ads to free users and users of the lowest-priced Go plan in ChatGPT. It is seen by the outside world as making efforts on both ends of "ad-free experience" and "free capabilities" to compete for users of generative AI chatbots.
According to the Anthropic announcement, free users can now create, edit, and process files of all types directly within a conversation with Claude, using the Sonnet 4.5 model, while paid pro users will still have access to the more capable Opus model. Claude can generate and process Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and PDF files, bringing conversational AI closer to daily office and document workflows.
At the same time, Anthropic also opened its "connectors" function to free users, allowing Claude to connect to third-party services and applications at zero cost. The officially listed connectors cover many common collaboration and productivity tools such as Slack, Asana, Zapier, Stripe, Canva, Notion, Figma, WordPress, etc., allowing users to read and write external data, trigger automated processes, or manage content in conversations.
The so-called "Skills" are defined by Anthropic as reusable resources based on the file system, used to inject specific domain knowledge and professional background into Claude. The company provides preset skills for common document scenarios such as PowerPoint, Excel, Word and PDF, and also allows users to create custom skills based on their own industry knowledge and internal data of the organization, allowing Claude to demonstrate greater professionalism and consistency in specific business scenarios.
In order to improve the user experience of free users, Anthropic has also added a "compaction" mechanism to the free plan to automatically summarize the early context of the conversation, thereby extending the length of the sustainable conversation of a single session. By automatically combing and condensing previous content, users can continue to advance tasks in the same conversation without frequently opening new sessions. However, the company stated that it has not increased the overall call limit of the free tier, so free users will still encounter usage limit or duration limit during high-intensity use.
A week before OpenAI announced the introduction of ads to free users of ChatGPT, Anthropic had publicly pledged to keep the Claude experience "ad-free." With the further relaxation of free function permissions this time, the industry generally believes that Anthropic is trying to attract ChatGPT users who are disgusted with ads but are unwilling to pay immediately to switch to the Claude platform with a combination of "ad-free + stronger free capabilities".