Apple is currently working with Anthropic on an updated version of Xcode that will offer support for AI code writing, editing, and testing.
Anthropic – best know for its “Claude” large language model and other large language models (LLMs) – is an American artificial intelligence (AI) startup company founded in 2021 that researches and develops AI in order to “study their safety properties at the technological frontier,” using the information harvested from the research to deploy safe models for the public.
Claude competes with Google’s Gemini and Open AI’s ChatGPT, and is well-know for its capabilities when it comes to programming tasks.
Although Apple last year announced its own “Swift Assist” AI-powered coding tool for Xcode would roll out in 2024, it was never released to developers. Internal testing showed that the Swift Assist system could make up information (called “hallucination”), actually slowing down development. Apple’s cooperating with Anthropic is basically an admittance by Apple that it could use some help.
The partnership with Apple is a major score for Anthropic. The company has previously partnered with Amazon to help power the retail website’s new Alexa+ assistant.
The new Xcode version worked on by Anthropic and Apple is slowly being rolled out to Apple employees. While Apple has been reluctant to use AI tools to develop software, the company has slowly become more comfortable with the idea, as its investments in LLMs has made the iPhone maker more comfortable with the idea.
