AI can automate more work as Claude connects to thousands of apps

Anthropic on Thursday launched a new way to connect apps and tools to its Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot Claude, as well as an expanded “deep research” capability that allows Claude to search the web, enterprise accounts, and more – all of which means that Claude now has more superpowers than before as it increasingly gets plugged into everything its creators can lay their hands on.

The new app connection feature, called Integrations, and expanded deep research tool, dubbed Advanced Research, are available in beta for subscribers to Anthropic’s Claude Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, and soon Pro. In related news, Anthropic has also upped the rate limits for its AI-powered coding tool, Claude Code, for Max customers.

Integrations and Advanced Research are both a part of Anthropic’s effort to keep pace with competing chatbots like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Anthropic reportedly hopes to reach $34.5 Billion in revenue in 2027, and while it’s certainly making inroads, it has a long way to go. Anthropic’s annualized revenue was around $1.4 billion in early March, according to one report.

See it in action

Integrations builds on the company’s MCP protocol, which lets AI models draw data from sources such as business tools to complete tasks, as well as from content repositories and app development environments. Integrations taps MCP to allow developers to create and host app servers that enhance Claude’s capabilities and let users discover and connect these servers to Claude.

“When you connect your tools to Claude, it gains deep context about your work — understanding project histories, task statuses, and organizational knowledge — and can take actions across every surface,” wrote Anthropic in a blog post.

To start, there are a number of Integrations from Anthropic partners, including Atlassian, Zapier, Cloudflare, Intercom, Square, and PayPal. Each expands what Claude can do. For example, the Atlassian Integration lets Claude summarize and create pages in Atlassian’s Confluence workplace software, while the Zapier Integration allows Claude to connect to the former’s app automation workflows – and indirectly more than a thousand other apps through Zapier’s own ecosystem.

As for the other new Claude feature launching today, Advanced Research, it allows Claude to crawl “hundreds” of internal and external sources to deliver what Anthropic describes as “more comprehensive” reports on a topic in anywhere from five to 45 minutes. Advanced Research can take advantage of Claude’s newly expanded connectors, Anthropic says, to search across Integrations and — when using the Claude Desktop app on macOS or Windows — MCP connected local drives.

“With its new ability to do more complex research, available when you toggle on the Research button, Claude breaks down your request into smaller parts, investigating each deeply before compiling a comprehensive report,” continued Anthropic in the blog post. “When Claude incorporates information from sources, it provides clear citations that link directly to the original material.”

There’s been a raft of deep research tools launched recently across chatbots such as Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and xAI’s Grok. Driving them are “reasoning” AI models, which possess the ability to think through problems and fact-check themselves - skills arguably important for conducting in-depth research on a subject.

Anthropic’s Research tool previously was among the faster tools in the deep research category, taking around a minute to compile reports. But the results tended to be shallower, in part because Research didn’t employ a reasoning model.