By Kenrick Cai and Jeffrey Dastin

SAN FRANCISCO – Anthropic, a startup backed by Alphabet and Amazon.com, released two updated artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, along with a new capability to autonomously perform computing tasks and record keystrokes users.

The new “use computer” feature can tell the AI ​​”where to move the mouse, where to click, what to type, in order to perform fairly complicated tasks,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief scientific officer, said in an interview.

This feature is tailored to software developers and represents a shift toward AI agents, programs that require little human intervention to perform multi-step actions. Researchers have touted agents as a frontier for AI development beyond chatbots, which easily conjure prose or computer code but not actions.

Anthropic demonstrated a use case for the feature that involved coding a basic website, and another that used various programs, including Google Search and Apple Maps, to plan a sunrise outing.

Anthropic offers software developers three versions of Claude, its family of AI models, at prices that vary depending on their performance. This week’s updates include Sonnet, the mid-tier model, and Haiku, the cheapest.

The new Haiku 3.5 can generate computer code in a way that is “almost comparable” to the version of Sonnet released in June, according to Kaplan. CEO Dario Amodei told Reuters at the time that the company intended to update the Opus, the top model, by the end of the year.

Computer use functionality is currently limited to the new version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and has safeguards to prevent its application from election-related spam, fraud and abuse, Anthropic said. Kaplan said AI still makes mistakes.

Mike Krieger, an Instagram co-founder who joined Anthropic this spring as chief product officer, said the company wants feedback from business customers on where to focus development of the feature. Meanwhile, a lab team within Anthropic is studying how to make that capability available to consumers, something Krieger said he personally wants.

“I was booking flights,” he said. “I really want this to be completely automated.”

Microsoft on Monday unveiled an application allowing its customers to create their own agents capable of handling requests, identifying prospects and managing inventory.

(Reporting by Kenrick Cai and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; editing by Lincoln Feast.)