Claude: The Constitutional AI with Large Memory

Reading time: approx. 10 min

After exploring ChatGPT's broad use cases, it is time to dive into another prominent player in the AI market: Claude, developed by Anthropic. The Claude family of models is known for its exceptionally large context windows and its focus on safety and ethical AI through a method called "Constitutional AI". For me, Claude is the model of all that has helped me truly take the step into a new world with the help of AI.

What you will learn

• What distinguishes the Claude models, including their focus on ethics and safety.
• The evolution of the Claude family, focusing on the Claude 3 family, Claude Sonnet 3.7, Claude Opus 3.7 and the Claude 4 family.
• How Claude's ability to handle long texts and code can be useful in teaching.
• Claude's performance in Swedish.

The Basics: What is Claude and "Constitutional AI"?

Claude is Anthropic's flagship model family of large language models (LLMs). Anthropic was founded with the goal of creating safer and more capable AI systems. One of the most distinctive features of Claude is its development with "Constitutional AI". This is a set of principles and values (like a constitution) that the model follows during its training, aimed at making it more helpful, honest and harmless.

Context Window: Claude's Big Advantage

One of Claude's most impressive features is its large context window. While older models had limited "memory", Claude models can handle up to 200,000 tokens, which corresponds to approximately 150,000 words or over 500 pages of text. For specific use cases this can be extended to 1 million tokens.

This means that Claude can read, summarize, analyze and answer questions about very long documents, entire books, comprehensive reports or large codebases in a single conversation, without "forgetting" information from the beginning of the text.

The Evolution of the Claude Family: From Claude 3 to Claude 4

Anthropic has developed Claude in several iterations, with continuous improvements in capacity and safety:

• Claude 3 family (Launched March 2024): This family consisted of three models in ascending order of capacity and intelligence:

  • Haiku: The fastest and most cost-effective model, excellent for everyday tasks.
  • Sonnet: A balanced model that is fast and intelligent, suitable for large-scale AI deployments. It is good at coding, software development and instruction following. Claude 3 Sonnet has a context window of 200k tokens.
  • Opus: The most capable model in the Claude 3 family, leading in complex reasoning, coding and scientific questions.

• Claude 3.7 models (Launched continuously): In addition to the original Claude 3 models, Anthropic has introduced specific point versions that optimize performance. These may be available to users with paid subscriptions like Claude Pro:

  • Claude Sonnet 3.7: An improved version of Claude 3 Sonnet, offering refined performance for a broad set of tasks, especially for balance between speed, cost and intelligence.
  • Claude Opus 3.7: A further development of Claude 3 Opus, providing even better ability to handle complex reasoning, in-depth analysis and demanding coding tasks.

• Claude 4 family (Launched May 2025): Anthropic introduced the next generation of Claude models: Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4. These build on the successes of the Claude 3 family and 3.7 models, with significant improvements:

  • Claude Sonnet 4: A significant upgrade from Claude 3 Sonnet and Sonnet 3.7, delivering superior coding and reasoning with more accurate instruction following. It has hybrid reasoning, which means it can give almost immediate answers or deeper, step-by-step thinking.
  • Claude Opus 4: Anthropic's most capable and intelligent model to date, setting new standards for complex reasoning and advanced coding. Opus 4 is also "the world's best coding model" according to Anthropic. It can perform long-running tasks and works continuously for several hours.

Common Strengths for Claude 4 Models (and also 3.7 models)

• Hybrid reasoning: These models can switch between quick answers and a deeper, visible thinking mode for complex problems. This makes them very effective for tasks that require both quick response and deep analysis.
• Improved coding: Both Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 have significantly improved coding capabilities, with Opus 4 as the most advanced.
• Multimodality (Vision): The Claude models have class-leading vision and can transcribe text from images, understand diagrams, graphs and technical illustrations.
• Tool use: The models can use external tools (like web search) during their "extended thinking" to improve answers.

Claude Code: AI for Coding

Claude Code is an agent-based coding tool powered by Claude models (primarily Sonnet 4) and works directly in your terminal or IDE. It is designed to help developers code faster by performing routine tasks, explaining complex code and managing Git workflows with natural language.

• Capabilities: Claude Code can edit files and fix bugs in a codebase, explain architecture and logic, handle testing and linting, and interact with Git to search history, resolve conflicts and create pull requests.
• Use cases in school: For teachers who teach programming, Claude Code can be an excellent tool to:
  • Debug student code and suggest improvements.
  • Explain complex code structures or algorithms.
  • Generate example code for teaching purposes.
  • Automate repetitive coding tasks for more advanced students.

Swedish Language Handling

Claude has its most extensive training in English, but also performs well in a range of other common languages, and has some ability to communicate in less common languages. According to Anthropic, Claude has robust multilingual capabilities, with strong performance in "zero-shot" tasks (where it gets no examples) across different languages. Its performance is consistent across both commonly spoken and more resource-poor languages. Tests show good conversational ability in Swedish, although occasional users have reported that it sometimes "invents" words or mixes in words from other languages in more complex scenarios. For most pedagogical use cases, Claude's Swedish should work very well.

Practical Examples in the Classroom

• Analysis of long texts: Let Claude summarize a novel, a thesis or several historical documents to quickly get an overview or find key information.
• In-depth research: Use Claude to ask complex questions about a topic and leverage its large context window to get detailed and nuanced answers based on comprehensive material.
• Creative writing with detailed context: Ask Claude to continue a story or develop a character while maintaining knowledge of a large amount of previous text.
• Complex coding problems (for you as a teacher): Use Claude Code to get help writing, debugging or refactoring code to create interactive learning resources.

Next Steps

In the next module we will explore Google Gemini, another multimodal AI model that is particularly relevant for teachers who use Google's ecosystem, and see how it can be integrated into teaching.