Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot already has a well-deserved reputation for excelling at coding-based tasks. That advantage grew on Thursday when the company announced that Claude can now write and run Javascript code in order to analyze data and generate insights in real-time.
"When you need precise, verifiable answers from data, Claude now works more like a real data analyst," the company wrote in Thursday's announcement blog post. "Instead of relying on abstract analysis alone, it can systematically process your data—cleaning, exploring, and analyzing it step-by-step until it reaches the correct result." This allows the AI to accurately analyze and visualize data from your CSV files, providing results that are both mathematically precise and reproducible.
While Claude has long been able to generate computer code from natural language prompts, the accuracy of those outputs could not be mathematically verified. The new analysis tool, on the other hand, operates more as a "built-in code sandbox," per the company. Within it, "Claude can do complex math, analyze data, and iterate on different ideas before sharing an answer."
The company lays out a number of potential applications for the new analysis tool. For example, marketers can upload customer interactions for Claude to dig through and uncover opportunities to improve those conversions, while sales teams will be able to upload global sales data and get Claude to generate performance analysis for each country or territory. Similarly, finance teams can upload their monthly financial data so that Claude can identify key trends within them. Engineers, on the other hand, will be able to upload performance logs from various servers and ask Claude for help in more effectively utilizing those resources.
As with its Artifact feature, Claude's analysis tool is mirrored by other major chatbot brands. Google's Gemini offers users Code Execution, which generates and runs python code, iteratively improving the results. OpenAI's ChatGPT, for its part, offers the Advanced Data Analysis tool which can also generate and run code. Khanmigo from Khan Academy, acting as an AI tutor for students, also offers highly accurate mathematic responses.
Source: Anthropic