Anthropic Launches Web Search API for Claude AI, Challenging Traditional Search Paradigms

Anthropic rolls out an API for AI-powered web search | TechCrunch

Anthropic is launching a new API that allows its Claude AI models to search across the web. Developers using it can build Claude-powered apps that deliver up-to-date info, the company said in a press release published Wednesday. The rollout of the API comes as AI companies look to augment their models in various ways that might attract new customers to their platforms. For its part, Anthropic last week debuted a tool to connect applications to Claude as well as an expanded "deep research" capability that lets Claude search enterprise accounts, websites, and more. "Developers can now augment Claude's comprehensive knowledge with current, real-world data by enabling the web search tool when making requests to [our] API," Anthropic wrote in its release. "With web search, developers can now build AI solutions that tap into current information without needing to manage their own web search infrastructure." When the web search API is enabled, Claude will use "reasoning" capabilities to determine whether a given request would benefit from up-to-date information or specialized knowledge. If Claude decides to search the web, it'll generate a search query, retrieve results, analyze them, and provide an answer with citations. Claude can also refine its queries and conduct multiple searches, using earlier results to inform subsequent queries. Developers can customize this behavior as well as specify domains from which Claude is allowed and not allowed to search. Devs can also allow or prohibit web search use at the organization level, Anthropic says. In related news, Anthropic is bringing web search to Claude Code, its tool that allows devs to tap Claude to complete various coding tasks. With web search enabled, Claude Code can access current API documentation, technical articles, and other information on development tools and libraries. Claude Code remains in beta as a research preview.

Anthropic launches Claude web search API, betting on the future of post-Google information access

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Anthropic has introduced a web search capability for its Claude AI assistant, intensifying competition in the rapidly evolving AI search market where tech giants are racing to redefine how users find information online. The company announced today that developers can now enable Claude to access current web information through its API, allowing the AI assistant to conduct multiple progressive searches to compile comprehensive answers complete with source citations. The move comes as web search undergoes its most significant transformation since Google revolutionized the field more than two decades ago. "Developers can now augment Claude's comprehensive knowledge with current, real-world data by enabling the web search tool when making requests to the Messages API," Anthropic said in its announcement. The new capability arrives amid signs that traditional search is losing ground to AI-powered alternatives. Apple's senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, testified today in Google's antitrust trial that searches in Safari fell last month for the first time in the browser's 22-year history. "I've lost a lot of sleep thinking about it," Cue said regarding potential revenue loss from Google's estimated $20 billion payment to be Safari's default search engine. AI assistants are eating Google's lunch: The decline of traditional search engine dominance The data points to a seismic shift in information discovery patterns. SOCi's Consumer Behavior Index shows that 19% of consumers already use AI for search, creating the first meaningful challenge to Google's stranglehold on web information access in decades. This transformation stems from fundamental differences in how AI assistants process and present information. Unlike traditional search engines that display a list of links requiring users to sift through results, AI assistants synthesize information from multiple sources, delivering concise, contextual answers. This eliminates the cognitive load of evaluating numerous websites and extracts the precise information users seek. The timing of Anthropic's announcement is particularly significant. With Safari searches declining for the first time ever -- a metric Cue called unprecedented in his testimony -- we're witnessing early indicators of a mass consumer behavior shift. Traditional search engines optimized for advertising revenue are increasingly being bypassed in favor of conversation-based interactions that prioritize information quality over commercial interests. Under the hood: How Anthropic's API transforms information retrieval for developers Anthropic's technical approach represents a significant advance in how AI systems can be deployed as information gathering tools. The system employs a sophisticated decision-making layer that determines when external information would improve response quality, generating targeted search queries rather than simply passing user questions verbatim to a search backend. This "agentic" capability -- allowing Claude to conduct multiple progressive searches using earlier results to inform subsequent queries -- enables a more thorough research process than traditional search. The implementation essentially mimics how a human researcher might explore a topic, starting with general queries and progressively refining them based on initial findings. For developers, the API offers granular control through the parameter that limits how many sequential searches Claude can perform. This addresses both cost considerations and prevents the AI from falling into research rabbit holes. The domain control features provide crucial guardrails for enterprise deployments, allowing organizations to ensure information comes only from trusted sources. At $10 per 1,000 searches plus standard token costs, Anthropic has positioned the feature as a premium offering, suggesting confidence that the value proposition justifies the price point compared to direct integration with free search engines. AI search wars heat up: Big tech scrambles to redefine digital information access The competitive landscape around AI search has become increasingly crowded and contentious. OpenAI integrated web search into ChatGPT last fall and recently expanded with shopping features, leveraging its massive user base -- 800 million weekly active users, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman -- to challenge Google's commercial search dominance. Apple's potential pivot represents perhaps the most significant threat to the status quo. With Safari accounting for 17.25% of global browser usage and 22.32% on mobile devices according to the most current data from StatCounter, any move to replace Google with AI search alternatives would dramatically alter market dynamics. Apple's discussions with Perplexity AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic suggest the company is actively exploring multiple partnerships rather than developing its own search technology. Meanwhile, specialized players like Perplexity AI are making strategic moves to embed themselves directly in the hardware ecosystem. Its partnership with Motorola represents an early attempt to position AI search as a device-level feature rather than merely an app or website. Google's reported resistance to this partnership, revealed during antitrust proceedings, indicates the search giant recognizes the existential threat these new models pose. The court-mandated unwinding of Google's Safari search deal -- potentially eliminating up to $20 billion in annual payments to Apple -- may accelerate this transition by removing the financial incentive for Apple to maintain the status quo. Content economy disruption: Publishers face existential threat as AI bypasses traditional websites The shift to AI search presents profound challenges for the content economy that has evolved around traditional search engines. When AI assistants provide direct answers synthesized from multiple sources, they dramatically reduce click-through to original content sites. This threatens the advertising-based business model that sustains much of the internet's information ecosystem. Google Search vice president Pandu Nayak's inability to offer "any guarantees" about traffic recovery highlights the gravity of this situation. Content creators face a future where being cited by AI may become more important than appearing in search results -- yet citations alone don't generate the advertising revenue that sustains content creation. This creates a potentially unsustainable dynamic: AI systems rely on high-quality web content to generate responses, but by redirecting user attention away from source websites, they undermine the economic model that produces that content. Without a new compensation mechanism for content creators, the long-term health of the information ecosystem could be compromised. For businesses, this shift demands a fundamental rethinking of digital strategy. Content optimized for traditional SEO may perform poorly in AI-mediated discovery, while content focused on providing clear, authoritative information may gain prominence even without traditional SEO markers. Beyond search: How AI information tools are reshaping the internet's future Anthropic's web search API represents more than just another feature in the AI toolkit -- it signals the evolution of internet information access toward a more integrated, conversation-based model. As search capabilities become embedded in AI assistants across applications, the distinction between searching, browsing, and asking questions continues to blur. This convergence is evident in how Quora is incorporating web search into its Poe platform and how Adaptive.ai plans to use it in customer-facing applications. Rather than search existing as a separate activity, it's becoming an ambient capability woven throughout the digital experience. For everyday users, this could eventually eliminate the need to think about where to look for information -- whether on Google, in a specialized app, or through an AI assistant. The cognitive load of navigating the internet's information architecture would shift from humans to AI systems. The race to redefine search has evolved into something much larger: a competition to create the primary interface through which people access digital information. With Google's traditional search model faltering, Apple potentially pivoting away from its long-standing Google partnership, and companies like Anthropic opening their capabilities to the developer ecosystem, we're witnessing the most significant restructuring of information access since the advent of modern search engines. In this new paradigm, the winner won't be determined by who has the best search algorithm, but by who creates the most intuitive, trusted, and capable AI interface to the world's information. The era of typing keywords into a search box may soon be remembered as merely a transitional phase in our relationship with digital knowledge.

Anthropic jumps into internet search, increasing the pressure on Google - SiliconANGLE

Anthropic jumps into internet search, increasing the pressure on Google The generative artificial intelligence startup Anthropic PBC is joining rivals such as OpenAI and Perplexity AI Inc. in an effort to overhaul the internet search industry. It has just announced the launch of a new application programming interface that enables its flagship Claude large language models to search the internet for up-to-date information in real time. Anthropic's web search API was announced today and it's available now. It says developers can start using it to build Claude-powered applications that deliver more accurate and timely information. When developers enable the web search API, Claude will tap into its "reasoning" capabilities to try and determine if a user's query would benefit from a real-time search for information. When it decides that's the best course of action, it will immediately filter through millions of websites by generating a search query, retrieving the results and analyzing them to inform the response it generates. The responses it delivers will come with citations that link to the source articles it uses, Anthropic said. "With web search, developers can now build AI solutions that tap into current information without needing to manage their own web search infrastructure," the company said in an announcement. What's intriguing about Claude's web search API is that it enables the AI to leverage the initial results it digs up to refine its queries and conduct additional searches, to try and generate a more comprehensive response for users. According to Anthropic, this mimics how humans might explore a topic, beginning with a general query and then, depending on what they find, refining their queries to dig up the exact information they're looking for. It said developers have the option to customize this behavior, and they can also specify which websites Claude is allowed to search. The same capability is coming to Anthropic's Claude Code tool, which is currently available in beta as a limited preview. The tool is aimed at helping developers complete coding tasks, and the web search API allows it to access the most up to date documentation, technical articles and developer tools and libraries. The launch of Anthropic's web search AI is not just another feature, but indicative of an evolution in the way people access information from the internet. It suggests people are embracing a more conversational search experience that's often faster and more convenient than traditional search engines. Already, there are signs that AI-based search is eating away at the dominance of traditional search engines. At Google LLC's ongoing antitrust trial this week, Apple Inc. Senior Vice President of Services Eddy Cue testified that Google searches in the Safari browser declined last month for the first time in 22 years. "I've lost sleep thinking about it," he said, noting that the company could lose a significant chunk of the $20 billion annual payment it receives from Google to make Google Search the default search engine in Safari. There are other signs of this shift, too. According to SOCi Inc.'s Consumer Behavior Index, 19% of consumers have already moved from search engines to AI-based search, in a move that presents the first serious threat to Google's dominance of web search in more than 20 years. People are opting for AI-powered search because it's a fundamentally different experience. Whereas traditional search engines just display a list of web links, requiring users to scroll down and make a decision over which one to click, AI assistants analyze multiple websites in real time, and spit out a more concise and contextual response to user's queries, saving them from the hassle of clicking on various links and then trying to find the information they're looking for buried within the page that loads up. Google isn't just threatened by Anthropic. Other AI companies, including OpenAI and Perplexity, are also pushing into the search business. OpenAI integrated web search abilities with ChatGPT last year, and has expanded on that recently with shopping recommendations, threatening Google's dominance in terms of internet commerce. OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman has said ChatGPT boasts more than 800 million weekly active users. Google is also likely to be extremely concerned that Apple is reportedly holding discussions with OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic over integrating their AI search features into the Safari browser. Safari accounts for more than 17% of global browser usage, and therefore is a major contributor to Google's search dominance. With prosecutors in Google's antitrust trial pushing for its deal with Safari to be prohibited, there are good reasons to think Apple might want to accelerate this transition. Google isn't the only one that's under threat from this transformation, for the trend also creates challenges for content creators, who are likely to see a substantial drop in traffic being directed to their websites by search engines. Because AI assistants provide direct responses to user's queries, those users are far less likely to click through to the original source website, meaning fewer advertising dollars for content creators. This leads to questions around the long term sustainability of AI search, which can only generate responses if it has high-quality source material. By reducing the amount of traffic going to websites, they're essentially biting the hand that feeds them. If creators don't earn enough revenue, they might stop creating the content those AI models need to deliver accurate responses, potentially leading to inferior AI-generated responses.

Anthropic API lets Claude browse the internet for you

Anthropic has launched a new API that enables its Claude AI models to search the web, allowing developers to build applications that deliver current information. The company announced the rollout in a press release on Wednesday. The API is part of Anthropic's efforts to enhance its models and attract new customers. Last week, the company introduced a tool to connect applications to Claude and expanded its "deep research" capability, enabling Claude to search enterprise accounts, websites, and more. According to Anthropic, developers can now "augment Claude's comprehensive knowledge with current, real-world data by enabling the web search tool when making requests to [our] API." This allows developers to build AI solutions that tap into current information without managing their own web search infrastructure. When enabled, Claude uses its "reasoning" capabilities to determine whether a request requires up-to-date information or specialized knowledge. If necessary, Claude generates a search query, retrieves results, analyzes them, and provides an answer with citations. It can also refine its queries and conduct multiple searches, using earlier results to inform subsequent queries. Which one to go for: Claude 3 Sonnet vs. Opus vs. Haiku Developers can customize Claude's behavior, specifying allowed and prohibited domains, as well as enabling or disabling web search at the organization level. Pricing for the API starts at $10 per 1,000 searches, and it is compatible with Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku models. The web search feature is also being integrated into Claude Code, Anthropic's tool that allows developers to use Claude for coding tasks. With web search enabled, Claude Code can access current API documentation, technical articles, and other information on development tools and libraries. Claude Code remains in beta as a research preview.