The AI technology landscape has witnessed a new interesting development with Anthropic, a startup with backing from industry giants like Google and Amazon.com, announcing the release of its latest AI suite, Claude 3. Positioned as a significant advancement in AI capabilities, Claude 3, and particularly its most advanced model, Claude 3 Opus, is said to surpass the performance of notable competitors, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini 1.0 Ultra across various benchmarks according to the startup. 

Claude 3 represents Anthropic's ambition to lead in the AI innovation race. A way clients would prefer Claude 3 in spite of a higher price tag is 'if they had a need for the most cognitively complex tasks, ' said Anthropic's President Daniela Amodei. Indeed, with a pricing strategy that reflects its premium offerings, Claude 3 Opus, offering enhanced cognitive capabilities, is well-positioned to draw in customers who want complex financial analysis, among other advanced applications.

Claude 3 is supposed to be designated as the first 'multimodal' AI suite from Anthropic, capable of interpreting both text and images, but it can't create images itself, a decision reflecting current market trends. This development comes in the wake of Google pausing image-generation features for its Gemini chatbot due to issues like diversity representation.

Anthropic's approach to maximising the technology's accessibility and acceptance is demonstrated by its policy of making Claude 3 available directly in 159 countries, as well as through the cloud platforms of Google and Amazon. The pricing structure, specifically for Claude 3 Opus, is intended to represent its exceptional capabilities and establish a new standard for AI performance pricing across the sector.