Hey there, and welcome to Decoder! I’m Hayden Field, senior AI reporter at The Verge and your Thursday episode guest host. I’ll be subbing in for Nilay for a couple more episodes, and I’m excited to keep diving into the good, the bad, and the questionable in the AI industry.

Today, I’m talking with David Hershey, who leads the applied AI team at Anthropic. David works with startups to help them figure out how to best apply Anthropic’s tech, plus testing new AI models to understand their limits.

I wanted to have David on because Anthropic released a new AI model called Claude Sonnet 4.5 earlier this week, and it’s been making waves. (For reference, Claude is to Anthropic what ChatGPT is to OpenAI.)

The new model, Sonnet 4.5, is being billed as a big breakthrough in autonomous, agentic AI

See Full Page