Anthropic, a startup backed by Alphabet and Amazon.com, released a pair of updated artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, along with a new capability to autonomously perform computer tasks and save users keystrokes.

The new "computer use" feature can tell AI "where to move the mouse, where to click, what to type, in order to do quite complicated tasks," Anthropic's Chief Science Officer Jared Kaplan said in an interview.

The capability is tailored to software developers and represents a move toward AI agents, programs that require little human intervention to carry out multi-step actions. Researchers have touted agents as a frontier for AI development beyond chatbots, which easily conjure prose or computer code though not actions.

Anthropic demonstrated a use case for the feature that entailed coding a basic website, and another that used various programs including Google Search and Apple Maps to plan a sunrise outing.