Anthropic PBC today updated Claude with a feature called Integrations that will enable the chatbot to access data from third-party cloud services.

The company rolled out the capability alongside an enhanced version of Research, a tool it introduced last month. The latter feature enables Claude to prepare detailed reports about user-specified topics. Research can now perform the task more thoroughly than before.

The new Integrations capability will enable Claude to incorporate data from software-as-a-service applications into its prompt responses. On launch, there are ready-to-use connectors for 10 services: Jira, Confluence, Zapier, Cloudflare, Intercom, Asana, Square, Sentry, PayPal, Linear and Plaid. Several more integrations are set to launch in the near future. 

In a demo video, Anthropic showed how Claude can use Integrations to retrieve a document from Confluence and turn it into an to-do list. At the user’s request, the chatbot then synced the to-do items to Jira.

If customers wish to connect Claude to an application for which a prepackaged integration isn’t available, they can build their own. Anthropic estimates that the process takes as little as 30 minutes. According to the company, developers can further speed up the workflow by using a set of tools that Cloudflare Inc. introduced in March to ease such projects.

Claude’s new connectors are powered by MCP, a data transfer technology that Anthropic open-sourced last November. It provides software building blocks that reduce the amount of work involved in connecting a large language model to external applications. OpenAI, Anthropic’s top competitor, rolled out MCP support to its Agents SDK last month.

Anthropic added MCP to Claude immediately after open-sourcing the technology last year. Until now, however, the chatbot only supported connections to applications installed on the user’s computer, which limited the feature’s usefulness. 

“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,” Anthropic staffers wrote in a blog post.

Anthropic rolled out Integrations today alongside an enhanced version of Research, a research tool it introduced for Claude last month. When a user asks a complicated question, the new version of Research breaks it down into a set of simpler concepts and then spends five to 45 minutes collecting relevant data. It then turns that data into a “comprehensive report complete with citations.”

The previous version of Research could only access data from the web and Google Workspace. According to Anthropic, the feature can now also collect information from the services that users connect to Claude via Integrations.

Integrations and Research are available in the paid Max, Team and Enterprise tiers of Claude. The chatbot’s entry-level Pro plan, which is geared toward consumers, is set to receive the features in the near future. 

Image: Anthropic