Feb 24 (Reuters) -

Anthropic on Monday launched an advanced AI model that can

produce faster responses or display its step-by-step reasoning

process, as it looks to gain a competitive edge in the

generative artificial intelligence industry.

The introduction of Anthropic's hybrid model - which

combines multiple reasoning approaches to solve complex problems

more effectively - comes amid fierce competition in AI

development, with U.S. tech firms vying against each other and

Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Alibaba ( BABA ).

The Amazon ( AMZN ) and Google-backed startup said

the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model is its most advanced and will be

available on all Claude plans, including Free, Pro, Team and

Enterprise.

However, the "extended thinking mode" feature is only

available on paid plans.

In extended thinking mode, the model "self-reflects before

answering," improving its performance on math, physics,

instruction-following, coding, and many other tasks, Anthropic

said.

The San Francisco-based company added that the hybrid

reasoning model has been designed to focus on "real-world" tasks

and less on math and computer science problems to reflect how

businesses actually use large language models.

Anthropic said it is also releasing a limited-release

preview of Claude Code, an agentic coding tool that helps

developers with coding tasks, allowing them to "delegate

substantial engineering work directly from their terminal."

An agentic coding tool is an AI-powered software application

that can autonomously perform coding-related tasks.

While users can choose how much time and resources are

devoted to answering a question, the company said its pricing

structure will remain the same as its previous models.

Anthropic's new model is cheaper than rival OpenAI's o1

model, costing $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million

output tokens compared to $15 and $60, respectively.