AI truly is everywhere, even when it comes to the race cars that whizz around Formula 1’s racing tracks worldwide. Atlassian Williams F1 announced a partnership with Anthropic to integrate the Claude generative AI deeply into the racing team’s operations.

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“Claude will be integrated across the entire Atlassian Williams organization—working alongside engineers and team strategists to support how the team thinks, plans, and performs across race strategy, car development, and operations,” read an Anthropic statement.

“With Formula 1 entering its biggest regulatory change in a generation, Claude will support the team’s ability to make the improvements that count.”

Atlassian Williams doesn’t say precisely that it’ll use Claude for the following purposes, although it’s certainly possible when they alluded to it. The press release refers to Claude’s usefulness in debugging code, analyzing research, and building new products.

At least part of the team’s esteem for Claude can be found in its statement that Claude helps teams “ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and make clearer decisions under pressure.”

Williams F1 isn’t the first Formula 1 team to partner with an AI. What makes it interesting is that it’s the first one to partner with one of the major generative AIs used by us common folk, rather than enterprise AIs built for large corporations.

Claude is very much a ChatGPT competitor. The same basic technology that underpins ChatGPT also underpins Claude. They’re both generative AIs, large-language models with a chatty, breezy tone that converses with its users.

Compared to Perplexity’s more straight-faced tone of presenting information like a research assistant (or a very smart search engine), Claude feigns humanity to a greater extent, like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and xAI Grok.

It’ll be interesting to see whether this multi-year partnership pays off for Atlassian Williams. It’ll be hard to quantify how much is down to the use of Claude if Atlassian Williams does begin to post more podium finishes, but we’re interested to see how the common Claude AI does when the results of its thinking are on display for the world at over 200 miles per hour.