Back in August, Anthropic made Claude capable of remembering past conversations. With the update, people could reference specific chats, so that they wouldn't need to repeat themselves when revisiting a topic. Today, the company has begun out a new, enhanced memory feature set, with the included improvements coming to all paying users.
Plenty of chatbots, including ChatGPT and Gemini, can remember past conversations, but Anthropic believes its implementation has a few legs up on the competition. For one, Claude will learn your preferences and work patterns over time, which Anthropic says will translate to the chatbot getting better at understanding how you work. Additionally, the company claims Claude is "fully transparent" about its memory, meaning users will see an "actual synthesis" of what it has recorded over time, instead of "vague summaries." If you want to edit its memory, you can do so through conversation.
At the same, Anthropic has made it easy to compartmentalize the data Claude collects. When using the Projects feature to group conversations together, the chatbot will create a distinct memory space for each grouping. In this way, information Claude has saved from your work conversations won't bleed over to your personal chats, for example. If you're coming from ChatGPT or Gemini, Anthropic has made it possible to import saved memories from those chatbots to Claude. You can also export any tidbits of context Claude saves to other AI platforms.
Ahead of today's announcement, Anthropic notes it conducted extensive testing to determine if Claude's new capabilities would lead to greater sycophancy and more harmful conversations. "Though this testing, we identified areas where Claude’s responses needed refinement and made targeted adjustments to how memory functions," the company said. "These iterations helped us build and improve the memory feature in a way that allows Claude to provide helpful and safe responses to users."
Max subscribers can enable Claude new memory capabilities starting today, with availability for Pro users to follow in the coming days. The feature is fully optional, and won't be turned on unless you toggle it through the settings menu.
