Anthropic Releases AI to Automate Mouse Clicks for Coders

Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
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Anthropic Releases AI to Automate Mouse Clicks for Coders

Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
Anthropic logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)

Anthropic, a startup backed by Alphabet and Amazon.com, released a pair of updated artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, along with a new capability to autonomously perform computer tasks and save users keystrokes.

The new "computer use" feature can tell AI "where to move the mouse, where to click, what to type, in order to do quite complicated tasks," Anthropic's Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said in an interview.

The capability is tailored to software developers and represents a move toward AI agents, programs that require little human intervention to carry out multi-step actions. Researchers have touted agents as a frontier for AI development beyond chatbots, which easily conjure prose or computer code though not actions.

Anthropic demonstrated a use case for the feature that entailed 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 price points that vary based on their performance. This week's updates come to Sonnet, the mid-tier model, and Haiku, the cheapest.

The new 3.5 Haiku can generate computer code in a manner "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 Opus, the most capable model, by the end of the year.

The computer use feature is currently limited to the new version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and comes with safeguards to prevent its application toward spam, fraud and election-related misuse, Anthropic said. Kaplan said the AI still makes mistakes.

Mike Krieger, a co-founder of Instagram who joined Anthropic this spring as chief product officer, said the company wants feedback from business customers to learn where to focus development of the feature. Meanwhile, a labs team inside Anthropic is exploring how to make the capability available for consumers, something Krieger said he personally wants.

"I was booking flights," he said. "I really just want this to be completely automated."

Microsoft on Monday unveiled an application for its clients to build their own agents that can handle queries, identify sales leads and manage inventory.



Apple Names Insider Sabih Khan as COO

The Apple logo is seen on the Apple store at The Marche Saint Germain in Paris, France July 15, 2020. (Reuters)
The Apple logo is seen on the Apple store at The Marche Saint Germain in Paris, France July 15, 2020. (Reuters)
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Apple Names Insider Sabih Khan as COO

The Apple logo is seen on the Apple store at The Marche Saint Germain in Paris, France July 15, 2020. (Reuters)
The Apple logo is seen on the Apple store at The Marche Saint Germain in Paris, France July 15, 2020. (Reuters)

Apple on Tuesday named insider Sabih Khan as its chief operating officer, taking over from Jeff Williams, as part of a long-planned succession.

Khan, who has been with Apple for 30 years and is currently the senior vice president of operations, will take on the new role later this month, the iPhone maker said in a statement.

Before joining Apple's procurement group in 1995, he worked as an applications development engineer and key account technical leader at GE Plastics.

Williams will continue to report to CEO Tim Cook and oversee the company's design team and Apple Watch.

The design team will report directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year.