Claude 2

Claude 2 is the second major Claude model generation Anthropic released, launching in July 2023 as a broad upgrade over Claude 1 in reasoning, coding, and factual accuracy. It extended the context window to 100,000 tokens as standard, letting it process documents such as long contracts, codebases, or entire books in a single request, and Anthropic reported an MMLU score around 78.5%, a notable jump for the time. Claude 2 was also the first Claude model made available directly to consumers through a standalone chat interface at claude.ai in the United States and United Kingdom, rather than only through the API and partner products.

Anthropic priced Claude 2 at $8 per million input tokens and $24 per million output tokens through the API. The model was followed a few months later by Claude 2.1, which pushed context length further to 200,000 tokens and reduced hallucination rates, and both were eventually superseded by the Claude 3 family. Claude 2’s original API access has since been deprecated in favor of newer models, though it remains a reference point for how quickly Anthropic iterated in its early years.