Claude can now understand complex PDFs filled with charts and graphics.
The Claude AI feature is available to all users
Photo Credit: Anthropic
Anthropic released another new artificial intelligence (AI) feature for its chatbot Claude on Friday. The feature, dubbed PDF image understanding, now allows Claude to see and process images embedded within PDF files including charts and graphics. This capability has been added to the recently released Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model. The company claims that this ability will allow the chatbot to accurately understand complex documents and offer better analysis of the data. The Anthropic application packaging interface (API) also supports PDF inputs. This feature is available in beta.
In its support documents, Anthropic detailed the new PDF support feature. The image understanding capability in PDF has been added to the Claude 3.5 Sonnet version 20241022, and it can process images in PDF as well as support PDF inputs.
Breaking down the first capability, Claude can now see and process images, charts, and graphics added to a PDF to perform a deeper analysis of the document. Once done, users can ask the AI queries about the particular images and it can answer with relevant information.
So far, Claude accepted images as input and could answer queries about them, however, it could not process images attached to a document. With this feature, Anthropic now allows users to get responses about PDFs in greater detail. The feature is likely aimed at the enterprise users of the chatbot who use it to analyse sales and marketing documents as well as other such files.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet now also accepts PDF as an input, which means users can now upload PDF files directly and let users ask queries about them. This brings Claude's capabilities on par with Google's NotebookLM, which is a dedicated platform for PDF and other file types.
Currently, the maximum file size of a PDF uploaded to Claude can be 32MB with a maximum page count of 1,000. Additionally, the chatbot cannot process PDFs which are password-protected or have encryption on them. Anthropic will make the feature available on Amazon Bedrock and Google Vertex AI soon.
Catch the latest from the Consumer Electronics Show on Gadgets 360, at our CES 2026 hub.