New Delhi, Sept. 24 -- In August, Anthropic set out to address a straightforward complaint from Claude users: the product felt slow.

"Users had been telling us it was slow, and they were right," the company said.

What followed was a two-week performance sprint in which Anthropic merged more than 3,000 changes across Claude.ai and its desktop application. By the end, the company said the core user experience was about three times faster on average.

But the speed gains are only part of the story. Anthropic used Claude throughout the process to identify bottlenecks, create benchmarks, propose fixes, monitor deployments and look for the next performance problem.

That turns what could have been a routine product optimization exercise into ...