Claude gains Projects

Background

By mid-2024 a person using Claude in a chat window had to reintroduce background material again and again: the documents, code and instructions that shaped the work had to be pasted or re-uploaded into each new conversation. Projects was Anthropic's answer to that problem, a way to keep the material for a body of work in one place.

What happened

On 25 June 2024 Anthropic launched Projects on claude.ai for all Pro and Team customers.^[1] The announcement also drew attention to Artifacts, which had been introduced days earlier with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Artifacts show generated code, documents and designs beside the chat.^[1][2]

Key details

Each project has a 200K-token context window. Anthropic likened that size to a 500-page book.^[1] A context window is the amount of text, measured in tokens, that the model can take into account at one time. A project is meant to hold documents, code and other knowledge the work depends on, so that the model can draw on them in every conversation inside the project.^[1]

Projects support custom instructions. A custom instruction is a standing note, such as a tone to use or a format to follow, that applies to the work in the project. Projects run on Claude 3.5 Sonnet.^[1]

Team users can share snapshots of their chats to a shared project activity feed. A snapshot is a saved copy of a conversation, so colleagues can see the work without having to find the original chat.^[1]

Anthropic also said that data shared in Projects is not used to train its models without explicit consent.^[1] This is the company's stated policy at launch, and it describes the commitment the company made for that feature rather than a guarantee of how any other data is handled.

Impact

Projects moved Claude from a series of separate conversations toward a workspace in which a body of material stays attached to the work. The combination of a large context window, custom instructions and shared snapshots made it practical for teams to keep their reference material together. The announcement also tied the feature to Artifacts, which had been added to the same product only days before, so the two arrived as parts of one change to how people work with Claude on the web.^[1][2]