Anthropic ships Claude Code as a research preview

Anthropic released Claude Code alongside Claude 3.7 Sonnet on 24 February 2025: a command-line agent that reads a codebase, edits files, runs commands and tests, and iterates on a task with the developer approving the risky steps. It reached general availability on 22 May 2025.

Why it mattered It was the first widely adopted terminal coding agent from a frontier laboratory, and set the shape that OpenAI’s Codex CLI and independent tools competed against for the rest of the year.