The one thing Claude does better than any other AI — and how to try it yourself

Features

By Amanda Caswell published yesterday

Anthropic’s ‘Claude in Claude’ trick lets the AI spin up fully functional, AI-powered mini-apps on demand — no coding required

Ask most AI chatbots to build you a custom chatbot and you’ll have to leave the chat window or jump into a separate builder interface. But, if you ask Claude, it just does it — live, in the same browser window, in about ten seconds.

This is the remarkable trick behind what Anthropic calls Artifacts with nested API calls — known among power users as “Claude in Claude.” It’s one of the rare AI features that actually feels new, and most people have no idea it exists.

What exactly is ‘Claude in Claude’?

When Claude creates an Artifact — the interactive app or document that appears in a side panel on Claude.ai — that app can itself make live calls to Claude’s API. In other words, the mini-app Claude builds for you has its own AI brain running inside it. You may like

• What is Claude? Everything you need to know about Anthropic’s AI powerhouse
• I spent 24 hours with Claude Opus 4.6 — here’s why it feels more human than any other AI I’ve tested
• I swapped ChatGPT for Claude for a week — and these 5 features convinced me to stay

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The result is a fully functional, AI-powered application — built by AI, running inside an AI chat interface — that you can interact with immediately, without ever leaving the conversation.

To see it in action, I asked Claude to build a “Hype Man” chatbot — an AI persona programmed to respond to absolutely everything with maximum, unhinged enthusiasm.

Within seconds, a fully functional chat interface appeared in the side panel. So if I typed something like “I made toast this morning.” The Hype Man replied: “BRO. TOAST?! YOU ARE LITERALLY BUILT DIFFERENT. THE WAY YOU OPERATE THAT TOASTER IS ELITE BEHAVIOR.”

Absurd, sure. Geniunely impressive? Absolutely!

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Why this is a bigger deal than it sounds

Building an AI-powered application normally requires meaningful technical skill: you need API keys, a development environment, a working knowledge of how to structure API calls, a frontend to display results and somewhere to host the whole thing. Even for skilled developers, it’s at minimum an hour of setup. For non-developers, it’s effectively impossible.

Claude collapses all of that into a single conversation. You describe what you want, and within seconds you have a working prototype you can actually use — and share with anyone who has the link.

Like any AI, the feature has limits worth knowing. The mini-apps Claude builds are ephemeral by default — they exist in your session. That means, if you want to use it again, you’ll have to be sure Claude’s memory is enabled so it can retrieve it again. What to read next

• What is Claude? Everything you need to know about Anthropic’s AI powerhouse
• I spent 24 hours with Claude Opus 4.6 — here’s why it feels more human than any other AI I’ve tested
• I swapped ChatGPT for Claude for a week — and these 5 features convinced me to stay

Also, something to note is that each conversation the inner AI has also costs API tokens, so heavy usage of a complex embedded chatbot can add up if you’re on a paid API plan. For casual use within Claude.ai‘s interface, this isn’t a concern — but it’s worth understanding the architecture.

How to try it yourself

You don’t need to do anything special to access this feature — it’s built into Claude.ai and available on all plan tiers. Just start with an open chat window.

The most direct approach: tell Claude you want to build an AI-powered app, then describe the persona or purpose. Try something like: “Build me a chatbot that acts like a skeptical editor reviewing my writing” or “Create an AI assistant that only speaks in the style of a 1920s detective.” Let your imagination go wild and Claude will handle the rest — writing the code, embedding the API calls and rendering the finished app in the side panel.

You can also iterate in real time. For example, if you don’t like the personality, just tell Claude to adjust it. Want to add a feature? Ask. The app updates instantly.

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