July 11 (Reuters) - Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup backed by Google, on Tuesday widened consumer access to its chat program Claude and upgraded underlying technology that the company says makes "Claude 2" better at tasks such computer coding and arithmetic. Businesses can launch products drawing on the model, and consumers in the U.S. and UK can chat with it online. Anthropic said in its upgrade of Claude it had doubled the model's performance on a safety evaluation. Unlike Claude, its recent GPT-4 model is "multimodal," meaning it can respond not just to text but to images that humans give it. Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI executives, said Claude 2 now scores 76.5% on the multiple-choice section of the Bar, up from 73% for its earlier model.

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Persons: Claude, Anthropic, ChatGPT, Sandy Banerjee, Banerjee, Jeffrey Dastin, Stephen Nellis, David Gregorio Our Organizations: Google, Microsoft, Thomson Locations: San Francisco, Silicon Valley, U.S