If that were true, they wouldn't publish hype results that then turn out to be completely unsubstantiated. Remember the "agents built a web browser"? I can't personally judge your friend as I don't know him. But the company is consistently lying about how good their product is in order to hype it up.
I don't talk to said friend about their work, so I genuinely have no insight here, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet what they have internally is considerably disparate from what is currently available in their consumer product.
The stuff they have internally might be slightly better than what they have now lmao. You have to super dense to believe otherwise.
Also I don't need the Anthropic ghouls telling me what I can or can not ask their stupid bot. At least Elon doesn't play this sad censorship game where you cannot say "boob" to it without it locking down.