Anthropic Boosts Claude with App Integrations and Advanced Research
Anthropic has launched new features for its AI chatbot, Claude, enhancing its capabilities with app integrations and advanced research tools. These features are available in beta for Claude Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, and soon for Pro users. This move aims to strengthen Claude's position against competitors like Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT.
App Integrations Expand Claude's Functionality
The new "Integrations" feature leverages Anthropic's MCP protocol, enabling developers to create and host app servers that extend Claude's functionality. Users can connect these servers to Claude, providing the chatbot with deeper context about their work, including project histories, task statuses, and organizational knowledge. Initial integrations include partnerships with Atlassian, Zapier, Cloudflare, Intercom, Square, and PayPal.
For example, the Atlassian integration allows Claude to summarize and create pages in Confluence, while the Zapier integration connects Claude to Zapier's app automation workflows.
Advanced Research for Deeper Insights
The "Advanced Research" feature allows Claude to crawl hundreds of internal and external sources to generate comprehensive reports in 5 to 45 minutes. This feature leverages Claude's expanded connectors and, when using the Claude Desktop app, can access MCP-connected local drives. Advanced Research breaks down user requests into smaller parts, investigates each deeply, and compiles a comprehensive report with citations linking directly to the original material.
Staying Competitive in the AI Chatbot Landscape
These new features come as Anthropic aims for significant revenue growth, targeting $34.5 billion by 2027. While the company has reportedly reached an annualized revenue of around $1.4 billion, it faces strong competition in the rapidly evolving AI chatbot market. The enhanced research capabilities place Claude alongside other deep research tools like Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot, and xAI's Grok, all powered by reasoning AI models capable of complex problem-solving and fact-checking.
Anthropic's previous research tool was faster but delivered shallower results. This update addresses that limitation by incorporating a reasoning model for more in-depth analysis.
