Anthropic adds on-demand Skills to Claude, boosting speed, cost, consistency
Anthropic just rolled out on-demand “Skills” for its Claude assistant, and the company says the change should make the tool faster, cheaper and more consistent for business users. In the Thursday announcement the firm explained that Claude can now pull in specialized expertise only when a task needs it, rather than relying on a single, all-purpose model. The idea is to give enterprises a more practical AI that fits into their existing workflows - something Anthropic sees as key in its race with OpenAI.
In theory the Skills architecture should cut down latency and lower costs that have kept some companies from adopting AI at scale. By layering these expertise modules on top of Claude’s core conversational engine, Anthropic hopes to offer a flexible option that feels reliable without requiring a lot of custom development. I’m curious to see whether the added flexibility will actually convince firms that need steady AI assistance.
Anthropic launched a new capability on Thursday that allows its Claude AI assistant to tap into specialized expertise on demand, marking the company's latest effort to make artificial intelligence more practical for enterprise workflows as it chases rival OpenAI in the intensifying competition over AI-powered software development. The feature, called Skills, enables users to create folders containing instructions, code scripts, and reference materials that Claude can automatically load when relevant to a task. The system marks a fundamental shift in how organizations can customize AI assistants, moving beyond one-off prompts to reusable packages of domain expertise that work consistently across an entire company. "Skills are based on our belief and vision that as model intelligence continues to improve, we'll continue moving towards general-purpose agents that often have access to their own filesystem and computing environment," said Mahesh Murag, a member of Anthropic's technical staff, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.
Will Skills live up to the hype? Anthropic claims the add-on cuts latency and compute costs by letting Claude pull pre-written instructions, code snippets and reference docs instead of building them from scratch each time. In practice, though, we still don’t know how much that will boost efficiency for real-world enterprises.
The upside seems to depend on how well users organize those folders - any missing pieces could blunt the promised consistency gains. A handful of early adopters say their workflows feel smoother, but it’s hard to say whether that translates into measurable improvements across a range of tasks. Anthropic pitches Skills as a direct answer to OpenAI’s tooling, touting speed, lower cost and reliability as its edge.
With so little public data on actual deployments, calling it a clear competitive win feels premature. Bottom line: Skills offers a handy way to fetch on-demand expertise, yet its real impact will hinge on how carefully teams set it up, how diligent they are, and whether enough businesses decide to roll it out.
Further Reading
- Salesforce, Anthropic Expand Partnership Supporting Regulated Industries with Trusted AI - Salesforce Newsroom
- Discover tools that work with Claude - Anthropic News
- Build and share AI-powered apps with Claude - Anthropic News
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Common Questions Answered
What are the three main benefits Anthropic claims for the new on-demand Skills feature in Claude?
Anthropic states that the Skills feature boosts speed, cost efficiency, and output consistency for business users. It achieves this by allowing Claude to retrieve pre-packaged instructions, code scripts, and reference materials on demand, reducing the need to generate responses from scratch.
How does the Skills feature specifically help reduce latency and compute costs for enterprise users?
The Skills feature reduces latency and compute costs by enabling Claude to access folders containing pre-built instructions and code scripts instead of generating them anew for each request. This retrieval-based approach is more efficient than full generation, making AI more practical for repetitive enterprise workflows.
What potential limitation does the article highlight regarding the consistency gains from the Skills feature?
The article notes that the consistency gains may be limited by how thoroughly users curate the folders of instructions and materials. Any gaps or inaccuracies in the user-prepared content could hinder the AI's ability to deliver reliably consistent outputs.
According to the article, what is Anthropic's strategic goal in launching the Skills capability for Claude?
Anthropic's strategic goal is to make artificial intelligence more practical for enterprise workflows as it competes with rival OpenAI. The company frames this rollout as a key step in the intensifying competition over AI-powered software development.