When someone puts a question to Claude or ChatGPT, the AI assistants from Anthropic and OpenAI, a small status line often flashes on screen. It says something like searching the web or running code. The words make it sound as if the AI has gone out, checked a page and come back with an answer. In fact the AI only reads text and writes text back, and everything else on the status line is work done by other software. Programs like it are called language models, and they have nothing else built in, not even a way to reach the internet.
Say someone asks Claude for the current weather in Amsterdam. The model has no way of knowing the forecast, since it finished learning months earlier, long before that weather formed. What it does know is that a web search tool is ready to use, because the app told it so ahead of time. So it writes a short request in a set format, which the surrounding software reads as an instruction rather than a stray line of conversation. The request reads, in effect, “run web search for Amsterdam weather right now.” Nothing has happened yet, because the request is only text, sitting in the conversation like any other sentence.
The request lands in the app’s own software, the ordinary programs running on servers behind Claude or ChatGPT. That software makes real requests to outside services, the way any other program does. None of it is intelligent in the way the model is. The software reads the model’s request, runs the actual search and collects results from the web. Anthropic’s documentation for Claude describes this handoff, with the company’s servers carrying out the search. OpenAI’s documentation lays out the same sequence for the models behind ChatGPT, where the app runs the tool the model asked for.
Search results come back as raw data, which the software turns into plain text and adds to the conversation. Only then does the model read it, pick out the detail worth keeping, 21 degrees and cloudy, and write the sentence the person sees. The search itself happened without the model doing anything at all.
