(Reuters) - Anthropic, a startup backed by Google (GOOGL.O) and Amazon.com (AMZN.O) on Thursday released an updated artificial intelligence model and a new layout to boost user productivity, continuing an industry sprint to push technology's frontier.

Three months after rolling out its Claude 3 family of AI models, Anthropic said it was launching Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Compared with Claude 3 Opus - which CEO Dario Amodei in March called the "Rolls-Royce of models" - Anthropic's latest system scores higher on benchmark exams, runs about twice as fast, and is priced for software developers at a fifth the cost.

AI "models are a bit more fungible than cars," Amodei told Reuters. "I don't have to buy them and hold onto them for 20 years. That's one advantage of our field."

Like Anthropic, ChatGPT's creator OpenAI, Google and others are similarly touting AI advances at a breakneck pace.

For consumers, Anthropic has made its latest technology available for free at Claude.ai and in an iOS app. It also is letting web users opt into a setting called "Artifacts." This organizes the content that users prompt Claude to generate - whether the outline for a novel or a simple computer game - in a window display alongside their chat with the AI.

Coupled with a new group subscription plan, Amodei said Artifacts was a step towards "being able to work collaboratively" and "being able to use your model to produce finished products."

Anthropic plans to release more AI models this year, including Claude 3.5 Opus, it said. "We want to have as fast a release cycle as we can, again, subject to our safety values," Amodei said.