Robert Hart is a London-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI and Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for Forbes.

Anthropic is rolling out an update for Claude that will let the AI chatbot “remember” past conversations without prompting. The upgrade for all paid subscribers should make Claude more useful and convenient.

Max subscribers will be able to turn on Claude’s “memory” in their settings from today, Anthropic said. The feature, which has been available to Team and Enterprise users since September, lets Claude remember details from previous chats. Pro subscribers will see the memory feature “roll out over the coming days,” Anthropic said. The company did not say whether it plans to make the feature available to free users in the future.

Anthropic says the goal is “complete transparency.” Users will be able to clearly see what Claude remembers rather than “vague summaries,” it said. Specific memories can also be toggled on and off or edited with natural conversation. For example, you could tell Claude to focus on specific memories or “forget an old job entirely.” Users can also create “distinct memory spaces” that will keep various memories apart. If it works, this could be useful at stopping memories from different conversations or projects bleeding through into other chats, handy for separating different work projects or using the bot for personal and professional reasons.

The hotly anticipated memory function brings Claude closer in line with rival chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini. All are competing ferociously for users and memory functions are a way of encouraging users to stick around rather than starting all over again with another bot. Claude has lagged its rivals in memory — OpenAI and Google both rolled out memory features for their chatbots last year — and it only gained the ability to remember past conversations this August. Even then, you had to explicitly ask Claude to remember.

Anthropic hopes to reduce the friction of starting over by letting users import memories from ChatGPT or Gemini. These will need to be copy-and-pasted in. Memories can also be exported “anytime” from Claude, it said. “No lock-in.”

Chatbot memory has, however, proven divisive. While hailed as a useful feature, some experts warn recall can help sustain or amplify delusional thinking and other mental health concerns colloquially called “AI psychosis,” particularly given the sycophantic tendencies of some models.

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• Robert Hart