In a pitch to investors last spring, Anthropic said it intended to build AI to power virtual assistants that could perform research, answer emails, and handle other back-office jobs on their own. The company referred to this as a “next-gen algorithm for AI self-teaching” — one it believed that could, if all goes according to plan, automate large portions of the economy someday. It took a while, but that AI is starting to arrive. Anthropic on Tuesday released an upgraded version of its Claude 3.5...