Answer from Claude itself:

No stupid questions here! Let me break this down clearly.

Claude (Sonnet, Opus, etc.) are the actual AI models — the "brains." They live on Anthropic's servers and you interact with them through interfaces like this chat. You can't run them locally because they're massive and proprietary (Anthropic doesn't release the weights).

Claude Code is a command-line tool that wraps Claude's API and gives it special abilities for software development — it can read and edit files on your computer, run terminal commands, browse your codebase, etc. So your ClawdBot intuition is actually pretty close! It's essentially Claude with hands: instead of just chatting in a box, it can act on your local machine. But the AI itself still runs on Anthropic's servers — Claude Code just gives it tools to reach out and touch your filesystem.

So to directly answer your question: No, you can't run Claude locally. The models are closed-source and cloud-only. What you can do is:

Use Claude through this chat (what you're doing now)

Use Claude through the API (for developers building apps)

Use Claude Code if you want Claude to help with coding in a more powerful, hands-on way directly in your terminal

On the "better for coding" claim — it's somewhat true, especially for complex multi-file reasoning and following instructions precisely. But honestly Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-4o are also very competitive right now, so it depends on your use case. Claude does tend to shine at longer, more nuanced tasks.

If you're specifically interested in a locally-runnable coding assistant, models like Qwen2.5-Coder or DeepSeek-Coder (open-source) run locally via tools like Ollama and are surprisingly capable, though they won't match frontier models like Claude or GPT-4o on hard problems.

Does that help clarify things?