Claude's Search Secret: Brave's Hidden Role

The AI chatbot Claude has a new trick up its sleeve. It can now search the web. This puts it on par with other chatbots out there. But here is the twist. The search engine powering this feature might not be what you think. First, let's talk about Brave. It is a browser and a search engine. It seems Brave is the secret sauce behind Claude's new web search feature. How do we know this? Well, a software engineer named Antonio Zugaldia noticed something interesting. He saw that Anthropic, the company behind Claude, added "Brave Search" to its list of partners. These partners process data for Claude. But there is more. A programmer named Simon Willison did some digging. He found that Claude and Brave Search returned the same citations for at least one search. Plus, Claude's search function has a parameter called "BraveSearchParams. " This is a strong hint that Brave is involved. Now, why is this a big deal? Well, some AI companies keep their search partners a secret. They do this for competitive reasons. For example, OpenAI uses Bing and other unknown sources for ChatGPT's search feature. So, it is interesting to see Brave's name pop up in Claude's documentation. Brave is not new to this game. It already powers the search functionality for another chatbot called Le Chat. In February, Brave and Mistral, the company behind Le Chat, announced their partnership. Le Chat uses Brave's search API for live web results. So, what does this all mean? It shows that partnerships in the AI world are complex. Companies often work together in ways that are not immediately obvious. It also highlights the importance of search engines in the AI chatbot landscape. After all, a chatbot is only as good as the information it can access.