Anthropic summons the spirit of Flash games for the AI age

On Wednesday, Anthropic announced a new feature that expands its Artifacts document management system into the basis of a personal AI app gallery resembling something from the Flash game era of the early 2000s—though these apps run on modern web code rather than Adobe's defunct plugin.

Using plain English dialogue, users can build and share interactive applications directly within Claude's chatbot interface using a new API capability that lets artifacts interact with Claude itself. Claude is an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT.

Claude has been capable of building web apps for some time, but Anthropic has put renewed focus on the feature that many have overlooked. "I'm amused that Anthropic turned 'we added a window.claude.complete() function to Artifacts' into what looks like a major new product launch," wrote independent AI researcher Simon Willison in a blog post, "but I can't say it's bad marketing for them to do that!"

On the Anthropic gallery site, example artifact apps come organized into categories like "Learn something," "Life hacks," and "Be creative." Featured artifacts at launch include an interactive writing editor, a bedtime story generator, a molecule visualizer, and a 3D first-person "Anthropic office simulator" where you can walk around and interact with simple representations of real Anthropic employees.

Users can examine the prompts and the chats that made those examples possible and even modify them for their own purposes. The beta Artifacts gallery feature is currently available to users on Claude's Free, Pro, and Max plans, and it's accessible through the Claude app's sidebar.