Claude 4.5 Is Anthropic’s Enterprise Power Play—And It’s Gunning for Your Workflows
If the last year of AI felt like a parade of shiny demos, Anthropic’s new Claude 4.5 is the ruthlessly practical cousin who shows up, rolls up its sleeves, and actually ships your spreadsheet, your legal brief, and yes, your app. This isn’t a consumer toy. It’s a direct swing at the enterprise AI market—coding, finance, operations, and the thousand unglamorous tasks that keep Indian businesses running.
Anthropic says Sonnet 4.5—the most capable tier of the 4.5 family—is its best coding model yet, with big gains in reasoning, math, and the ability to use computers like a diligent analyst who never blinks. Independent coverage and early benchmarks back that up.
What’s actually new (and why it matters)
1) Sustained, long-horizon work.
One early client reportedly ran Claude 4.5 in autonomous coding mode for ~30 hours straight, up from ~7 hours previously. In plain English: fewer restarts, fewer handoffs, more end-to-end delivery on multi-step tasks like building internal tools or refactoring legacy code. That’s the kind of reliability ops and engineering managers quietly worship.
2) Real software engineering chops.
On SWE-bench Verified—a respected benchmark that requires fixing real-world GitHub issues—Anthropic reports 77.2%, using a simple tool scaffold. A public leaderboard and third-party write-ups echo the jump. Benchmarks aren’t the whole story, but they’re not nothing either.
3) Better at “using a computer.”
Claude 4.5 scores roughly ~60% vs ~40% for its predecessor on OS/desktop interaction tests (think: operating spreadsheets, editing docs, navigating UIs). That’s relevant if your teams need an agent to reconcile Tally exports, clean CSVs, or hammer out 200 formatted invoices without throwing a tantrum.
4) Enterprise availability where you already are.
Claude 4.5 rolls into Amazon Bedrock, making it easier for Indian enterprises already on AWS to try it without messy infra work. And on the Microsoft side, Copilot Studio is adding Claude models—giving large orgs some long-awaited model choice inside 365 workflows.
Where Claude 4.5 slots in vs. GPT and Gemini
Let’s skip the hype and talk buying decisions. If you’re already deep into GPT-5 for content and chat-heavy workflows, you’ll still be happy there. Google’s Gemini 2.5 shines in speed and multimodal retrieval. Claude 4.5 stakes the claim on reasoned coding, complex agentic tasks, and compliance-friendly guardrails—the workhorse zones. That division of labour is increasingly reflected in enterprise stacks that run multiple models behind one interface. Microsoft explicitly says it’s widening model choice in 365, and that’s the most corporate sentence you’ll read today—because it unlocks practical flexibility for CIOs.
Why this matters for India, specifically
• Cloud pathways are clear. If your workloads live on AWS Mumbai or you’re standardising on Microsoft 365, you can evaluate Claude 4.5 without forklift upgrades. That reduces procurement friction—always the hidden tax on innovation.
• Talent and local presence are growing. Anthropic is publicly expanding in India as part of its global push. For large BFSI, IT services, and GCCs, vendor presence plus enterprise features equals faster pilots, clearer SLAs, and fewer “US hours only” headaches. (Treat exact market-share claims cautiously, but the hiring signals are real.)
What early adopters should test
Coding & DevOps
• Give Claude 4.5 a stubborn internal repo (TypeScript + Python + oddball scripts) and measure issue closure rate, review quality, and runtime bugs across a one-week sprint. Include tests that require tool use (bash, file edits) because that’s where the model flexes.
Finance & Ops
• Trial a reconciliation pipeline: pull exports from ERP, validate against bank statements, flag mismatches, generate a memo. Watch for auditability—can you trace each step and reproduce outputs? (Microsoft and AWS integrations help here.)
Knowledge & Legal
• Throw complex, citation-heavy tasks at it: compliance checklists, SOP generation, contract redlines. Evaluate consistency and source handling. You want fewer “creative” interpretations and more “this clause conflicts with XYZ policy.” (Anthropic’s focus has long been on safer defaults.)
Guardrails, governance, and the boring (important) bits
Anthropic keeps emphasising safety rails and professional-environment defaults. That doesn’t absolve you from governance: keep data boundaries, PII handling, and prompt logging tight; run red-team tests; and ensure every agentic workflow has a human-in-the-loop or a rollback plan. The 4.5 System Card outlines model behaviour and limits—use it to draft internal policies, not just slides.
So…should you switch?
If your core workloads are code-heavy and process-bound—internal tools, data cleanup, doc automation—Claude 4.5 deserves a serious bake-off. Thanks to Bedrock and Copilot Studio, you can now evaluate it next to GPT and Gemini inside the same estate. In other words, this isn’t a theology debate; it’s a procurement exercise. Run the RFT, measure outcomes, and standardise on model choice by task, not brand. That’s how enterprise AI grows up.
Note: All performance claims are sourced from Anthropic’s release and third-party reporting; validate on your data before standardising.