Anthropic
Frontier lab · safety-focused
First-party tools
- Claude appsweb / desktop / mobile
- Claude Code
- Cowork
- Claude in Chrome
- Claude in Excel
- Claude PlatformAPI
Models — the Claude family
- Claude Opus 4.8
- Claude Sonnet 4.6
- Claude Haiku 4.5
A field guide to the AI landscape: the companies, the tools you open, and the models doing the thinking.
A field guide
I often hear people confusing Claude (the tools) with Claude (the models) and Anthropic (the company). Sometimes people are not clear that OpenAI and ChatGPT are related, or that Google and Gemini are related. The mix-up is understandable.
The following can be used to understand the difference between the three layers of the AI landscape: the company that builds the models, the tool you open, and the model doing the thinking.
Layer 1 · Who
The organization that trains the models and ships the products: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, Microsoft.
Anthropic is the company. Claude is its brand.
Layer 2 · What you open
The app or service you actually touch: a chat app, a coding agent, a browser plugin, an API.
Claude (the apps), ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor; these are tools.
Layer 3 · What's thinking
The trained engine doing the reasoning. Many tools let you choose which model runs underneath. This is often where the confusion starts.
Opus, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Grok; a model is not the app it runs in.
Pick a company below to trace its models across the board. They light up even inside tools another company built.
Frontier lab · safety-focused
Frontier lab
Frontier lab · platform giant
Frontier lab · open-weight
Frontier lab · integrated with X
Platform giant · builds and rents models
This is the layer that confuses everyone. These tools don’t make their own frontier models — they let you pick someone else’s. Choose a company above and watch its models light up inside tools it doesn’t own.
AI code editor · by Anysphere
Coding assistant · by Microsoft
Answer engine · by Perplexity AI
Enterprise AI gateway · by Liminal
Current as of June 2026. Model versions change often; treat exact numbers as a snapshot.