Anthropic embeds Slack, Figma and Asana inside Claude, turning AI chat into a workplace command center

Anthropic announced Monday that users can now open and interact with popular business applications directly inside Claude, the company's AI assistant—a significant expansion that transforms the chatbot from a conversational tool into an integrated workspace where employees can build project timelines, draft Slack messages, create presentations, and visualize data without switching browser tabs.The rollout, which goes live today, includes integrations with Amplitude, Asana, Box, Canva, Clay, Figma, Hex, Monday.com, and Slack. Salesforce integration is coming soon. The feature marks a new chapter in Anthropic's aggressive push to dominate enterprise AI, arriving just days after the company's CEO made headlines at Davos with bold predictions about AI replacing white-collar workers."MCP Apps are an extension to the core MCP protocol and are part of the open source MCP ecosystem," Sean Strong, Anthropic's product manager for MCP Apps, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. "Within Claude.ai, connectors require a paid Claude plan — Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise — but there is no additional charge associated with using connectors."That pricing decision is notable. Rather than monetizing integrations separately or charging partners for distribution, Anthropic is bundling interactive tools into existing subscription tiers — a strategy designed to accelerate adoption and deepen Claude's foothold in corporate environments where the company reportedly already leads OpenAI.Inside MCP Apps, the open-source technology that lets Claude control your favorite work toolsThe technical foundation is what Anthropic calls "MCP Apps," a new extension to the Model Context Protocol, the open standard for connecting external tools to AI applications that Anthropic open-sourced last year. MCP Apps allow any MCP server to deliver an interactive user interface within any supporting AI product—meaning the technology isn't limited to Claude.In practice, the integrations allow for surprisingly granular control. Users can build analytics charts in Amplitude and adjust parameters interactively to explore trends. They can turn conversations into Asana projects with tasks and timelines that sync automatically. They can prompt Claude to generate flowcharts or Gantt charts in Figma's collaborative whiteboard tool, FigJam. They can draft Slack messages, preview formatting, and review before posting.The Hex integration may prove particularly valuable for data teams: users can ask data questions in natural language and receive answers complete with interactive charts, tables, and citations — effectively turning Claude into a business intelligence interface."We open sourced MCP to give the ecosystem a universal way to connect tools to AI," the company said in its announcement blog. "Now we're extending MCP further so developers can build interactive UI on top of it, wherever their users are."What happens when AI can send messages and create projects on your behalfWith AI systems increasingly capable of taking real-world actions — sending messages, creating projects, publishing content — the question of guardrails becomes critical. Can an employee accidentally send an unreviewed Slack message or publish an incomplete Canva presentation?Strong addressed this directly. "Most major MCP clients, including Claude, provide consent prompts that help users determine if they want to take an action via a MCP server," he said.For enterprise deployments, IT administrators retain control. "Team and Enterprise admins have the ability to control which MCP servers users in their organizations have the ability to use," Strong explained.The consent-prompt approach is a middle ground between full autonomy and cumbersome approval workflows. But it also places significant responsibility on individual users to review actions before confirming them — a design choice that may draw scrutiny as AI agents become capable of more consequential decisions.The security concerns are not hypothetical. As Fortune reported last week, Anthropic's Claude Code product faces vulnerabilities including "prompt injections," where attackers hide malicious instructions in web content to manipulate AI behavior. The company has implemented multiple security layers, including running some features in virtual machines and adding deletion protection after users accidentally removed files. "Agent safety—that is, the task of securing Claude's real-world actions—is still an active area of development in the industry," Anthropic has acknowledged.Claude Code's viral success set the stage for Anthropic's enterprise ambitionsThe interactive tools announcement arrives at a moment of unusual momentum for Anthropic. Claude Code, the company's coding assistant released in February 2024, has become a viral hit that has captured attention far beyond its intended developer audience.Originally built for software developers, Claude Code has captured attention far beyond its intended audience. Non-programmers have deployed it to book theater tickets, file taxes, and monitor tomato plants. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called it "incredible." Even Microsoft, which sells the competing GitHub Copilot, has widely adopted Claude Code internally, with non-developers reportedly encouraged to use it.Boris Cherny, Anthropic's head of Claude Code, told Fortune that his team built Cowork — a user-friendly version of the coding product for non-programmers — in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself. "Engineers just feel unshackled, that they don't have to work on all the tedious stuff anymore," Cherny said.Claude Code is now used by Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Salesforce, Accenture, and Snowflake, according to Anthropic. Claude's total web audience has more than doubled since December 2024, and daily unique visitors on desktop are up 12% globally year-to-date, according to data from Similarweb and Sensor Tower published by The Wall Street Journal.The company is also reportedly planning a $10 billion fundraising round that would value Anthropic at $350 billion — a staggering figure that reflects investor confidence in the company's enterprise traction.Anthropic's CEO stirred controversy at Davos with predictions about AI replacing workersThe interactive tools launch also arrives against a backdrop of intense debate about AI's impact on employment — a debate that Anthropic's own CEO helped intensify at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.Dario Amodei told a Davos audience that AI models would replace the work of all software developers within a year and would reach "Nobel-level" scientific research in multiple fields within two years. He predicted that 50% of white-collar jobs would disappear within five years."I have engineers within Anthropic who say 'I don't write any code anymore. I just let the model write the code, I edit it,'" Amodei said. "We might be six to 12 months away from when the model is doing most, maybe all of what software engineers do end-to-end."Not everyone agrees with that timeline. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Google DeepMind, said at the same conference that today's AI systems are "nowhere near" human-level artificial general intelligence. Yann LeCun, the Turing Award-winning AI pioneer who recently left Meta to found Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, went further, arguing that large language models "will never be able to achieve humanlike intelligence" and that a completely different approach is needed.Why embedding AI into daily workflows could create powerful lock-in for enterprisesAnthropic's integration strategy reflects a broader shift in enterprise AI competition. The battleground is moving from model benchmarks and capability demonstrations toward workflow integration — the degree to which AI systems become embedded in how companies actually operate.By making Claude the interface through which employees interact with Asana, Slack, Figma, and other daily tools, Anthropic is positioning itself not merely as an AI provider but as a workflow orchestration layer. The more actions that flow through Claude, the harder it becomes for enterprises to switch to a competitor.This approach mirrors strategies that proved successful for earlier generations of enterprise software. Salesforce built its dominance partly by becoming the system of record for customer data. Slack grew by centralizing workplace communication. Anthropic appears to be betting that AI assistants can occupy a similar position — the default starting point for work itself.The open-source foundation of MCP may accelerate this strategy. By making the protocol available to any developer, Anthropic encourages a broad ecosystem of integrations that all funnel through MCP-compatible clients — of which Claude is the most prominent. The company benefits from network effects even as it maintains the standard is open.The race to become the operating system for AI-powered work is just getting startedThe launch notably excludes some major enterprise platforms. Salesforce integration is listed as "coming soon," and there's no mention of Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or other productivity suites that dominate corporate environments. Those gaps may limit initial adoption in organizations heavily invested in those ecosystems.The feature is available on web and desktop for paid Claude plans, with support for Claude Cowork — the file management agent launched last week — coming later. Mobile support was not mentioned in the announcement.For enterprises evaluating Claude against OpenAI's offerings and other competitors, the interactive integrations represent a tangible differentiator. The ability to take action within business tools — rather than simply generating text that users must copy elsewhere — addresses a persistent friction point in AI adoption.Whether that advantage proves durable depends on how quickly competitors respond. OpenAI has its own enterprise ambitions and partnerships. Google is integrating Gemini across its productivity suite. Microsoft continues to deepen Copilot's presence in Office applications.But the larger significance may be what today's announcement signals about where enterprise software is headed. For decades, the default unit of work has been the application — the spreadsheet, the project tracker, the messaging platform. Anthropic is wagering that the future belongs to the AI layer that sits above them all.If the company is right, the question for every enterprise software vendor becomes uncomfortably simple: Do you want to be the tool, or the thing that controls the tools?Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei VentureBeat Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei VentureBeat