Claude 3.7 Sonnet now supports real-time web searching — but there's a catch

The line between "AI Chatbot" and "Search Engine" gets thinner each day as Google rolls out new tools to Gemini and ChatGPT's Deep Research continues to get more helpful at finding what you need.

Now, Anthropic's excellent Claude model will work similarly, letting the relatively minimal-looking chatbot search the web via an in-window update that brings external results closer than ever without needing to go outside.

Announced via a blog post last week, Claude will now have access to "the latest events and information, boosting its accuracy on tasks that benefit from the most recent data".

Unfortunately, there's something of a catch since it's currently only available to paid users within the United States.

Easy fact checking

If you've spent any time with Claude, you'll know that its reliance on LLMs that are sometimes not up to date can cause issues with accuracy.

This latest update should mean its content is more useful and timely, while Anthopic is keen to stress the source of its information is easy to surface, speeding up fact checking.

“When Claude incorporates information from the web into its responses, it provides direct citations so you can easily fact check sources. Instead of finding search results yourself, Claude processes and delivers relevant sources in a conversational format."

"This enhancement expands Claude’s extensive knowledge base with real-time insights, providing answers based on more current information,” the blog post explains.

The catch

You can find web search in the prompt box when submitting a Claude query, but you can also choose not to use it if you're happy your question can be answered via an internal LLM solution.

Web search is in beta, and is currently only available to paid Claude users in the US.

That's a sticking point if you're just using the free version of Claude or, like me, are based outside the USA.

But there's good news: the feature is expected to eventually make its way to other markets and — eventually — free users.

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