Image Credits:Anthropic
10:07 AM PDT · March 21, 2025
Earlier this week, Anthropic rolled out a web search feature for its AI-powered chatbot platform, Claude, bringing the bot in line with many of its rivals. It wasn’t immediately clear which search index might be powering the feature — one possibility was that Anthropic had developed its own. But evidence suggests it’s Brave Search, the search engine maintained by browser developer Brave.
As spotted by software engineer Antonio Zugaldia on Friday, Anthropic added “Brave Search” to the “subprocessor list” in its documentation this week — the list of Anthropic partners who process Claude data. British programmer Simon Willison reports that at least one search in Claude and Brave returned identical citations. Willison also found that Claude’s web search function contains a parameter called “BraveSearchParams.”
We’ve reached out to Anthropic and will update this post if we hear back.
Brave underpins at least one other chatbot’s search functionality: Mistral’s chatbot platform Le Chat. In February, Brave and Mistral announced that Le Chat would use Brave’s search API for live web results.
Some AI companies keep info about their search index partnerships close to the chest, possibly for competitive reasons. OpenAI has a partnership with Bing but uses other undisclosed sources to power the search experience in ChatGPT as well.
Kyle Wiggers is TechCrunch’s AI Editor. His writing has appeared in VentureBeat and Digital Trends, as well as a range of gadget blogs including Android Police, Android Authority, Droid-Life, and XDA-Developers. He lives in Manhattan with his partner, a music therapist.
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