SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 22 - Anthropic, a startup backed by

Alphabet and Amazon.com ( AMZN ), released a pair of

updated artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, along with a

new capability to autonomously perform computer tasks and save

users keystrokes.

The new "computer use" feature can tell AI "where to move

the mouse, where to click, what to type, in order to do quite

complicated tasks," Anthropic's Chief Science Officer Jared

Kaplan said in an interview.

The capability is tailored to software developers and

represents a move toward AI agents, programs that require little

human intervention to carry out multi-step actions. Researchers

have touted agents as a frontier for AI development beyond

chatbots, which easily conjure prose or computer code though not

actions.

Anthropic demonstrated a use case for the feature that

entailed coding a basic website, and another that used various

programs including Google Search and Apple Maps to plan

a sunrise outing.

Anthropic offers software developers three versions of

Claude, its family of AI models, at price points that vary based

on their performance. This week's updates come to Sonnet, the

mid-tier model, and Haiku, the cheapest.

The new 3.5 Haiku can generate computer code in a manner

"almost comparable" to the version of Sonnet released in June,

according to Kaplan. CEO Dario Amodei told Reuters at the time

that the company intended to update Opus, the most capable

model, by the end of the year.

The computer use feature is currently limited to the new

version of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and comes with safeguards to

prevent its application toward spam, fraud and election-related

misuse, Anthropic said. Kaplan said the AI still makes mistakes.

Mike Krieger, a co-founder of Instagram who joined Anthropic

this spring as chief product officer, said the company wants

feedback from business customers to learn where to focus

development of the feature. Meanwhile, a labs team inside

Anthropic is exploring how to make the capability available for

consumers, something Krieger said he personally wants.

"I was booking flights," he said. "I really just want this

to be completely automated."

Microsoft ( MSFT ) on Monday unveiled an application for its

clients to build their own agents that can handle queries,

identify sales leads and manage inventory.

(Reporting By Kenrick Cai and Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco;

Editing by Lincoln Feast.)