Anthropic makes Claude AI Artifacts available for free

Back in June, Anthropic released the Claude 3.5 Sonnet model of it’s AI chatbot . Alongside the new model, a new preview feature was introduced: Artifacts. An Artifact is a dedicated window that can be used to display content separate to your main chat, such as code, websites, flowcharts or SVG images.

Artifacts was released as a preview feature back in June, but Anthropic has now made it available as a core feature of Claude AI, which is available to users on Free, Pro, and Teams plans. You can use Artifacts in the iOS and Android apps, as well as on the web. However, as a Free user, you have fairly restrictive limits on the number of messages you can send.

What can you do with Artifacts in Claude AI?

Using Artifacts can speed up your workflow

The entire concept for Artifacts came when Alex Tamkin, one of the research staff at Anthropic, was using Claude AI to create a website. He found himself constantly having to generate the code, copy it to an editor, save the file, and then open it in a web browser. He decided to build a rough version of Claude that would display the web page in a side-by-side interface as he was building it. This was the beginnings of what would eventually become Artifacts.

The origin of Artifacts shows a perfect example of what makes the feature so useful. It’s now possible to use Claude to help create the code for a website, and then see a live preview of the page in the Artifacts window, cutting out the need for all the additional steps. It’s not a ground-breaking AI development by any means, but it’s a significant quality of life improvement that makes it easier to be more productive when using Claude.

Websites aren’t the only things you can display in Artifact windows, however. You can not only display generated code in an Artifacts window, but you can also run that code. For example, you can ask Claude to generate the code for a simple retro video game , and then run that code in an Artifact window. I asked Claude to make a simple side scrolling game in which a robot jumps over obstacles. The code was created in an Artifacts window, and then I was able to play the game in the Preview tab of that window. It took as long as it took me to type out my prompt to have a working version of the game that I could play within Claude.

You can also use Artifacts windows for lots of other uses, too. You can create and display flowcharts, build interactive dashboards, create visualizations, design SVG graphics, and more. You don’t need to do anything to use Artifacts windows either; Claude will automatically create one if it thinks it would be useful in the current circumstances.

What are the limits when using Artifacts as a Free user?

You won’t be able to make much progress with a Free account

While making this feature available to Free users is a positive step, it does come with restrictions. Anthropic doesn’t give a set limit on how many messages you can send as a Free user, instead stating that the limit will vary based on demand. When I first tried Artifacts on my free account, I was only able to give 10 prompts before I was limited and told to wait about five hours before I was able to start giving further prompts.

Your mileage may vary, but ten prompts isn’t a huge amount. Admittedly, I was able to create a working game with just a single prompt, but that would mean I could only make nine further edits to the game before being limited.

It’s possible that I may have had more turns if I’d tried at a different time, but considering that I was using Claude when most of the US is asleep, it seems unlikely that I would get significantly more at any other time. To be fair, many other AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT , have limits on what free users can do.

With a Pro account, I was able to continue working on my game without hitting any further blocks. Anthropic says that Claude Pro offers at least five times the usage compared to the free version.