Anthropic has just released an update to its AI assistant Claude that will make it much more powerful, as the model now has the ability to interact with external tools and APIs.
According to Anthropic, this will enable Claude to perform complex tasks, manipulate data, and provide more dynamic responses.
For example, it can pull information from invoices to avoid manual data entry, convert prompts into structured API calls, answer questions by searching databases or using web APIs, or automate tasks through software APIs.
Developers will be able to specify which tool Claude should use or allow it to determine and use the tool it thinks is best for the job.
Tool use also works with images, enabling Claude to incorporate image inputs in applications.
“Claude with tool use is accurate and cost-effective, and now powers our live voice-enabled AI tutoring sessions. Within just a few days, we integrated tools into our platform,” said Ryan Trattner, CTO and co-founder at StudyFetch. “As a result, our AI tutor, Spark.E, acts agentically—displaying interactive UIs, tracking student progress in context, and navigating through lectures and materials. Since implementing Claude with tool use, we’ve observed a 42% increase in positive human feedback.”