According to engadget, Anthropic has announced deeper integrations for its Claude AI chatbot with nine third-party app launch partners as of today. The new functionality allows Claude to connect to platforms like Slack, Canva, Figma, Box, and Asana, fetching files and performing tasks within those apps directly. For example, Claude can now search for files in Box, preview documents, and answer questions about their content, or turn chat conversations into Asana projects and timelines. This new capability is powered by the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a technology Anthropic released in fall 2024 to simplify third-party connections. The protocol has since become an industry standard, with OpenAI adopting it last year, and Anthropic donated MCP to the Linux Foundation at the end of 2024.
Claude Gets More Useful and Sticky
This is a smart, obvious, and necessary move for Anthropic. Here’s the thing: the real value of an AI assistant isn’t in how well it writes a poem, but in how seamlessly it can operate within your existing workflow. Being able to tell Claude, “Grab that design brief from the Slack channel about Project X and turn the action items into an Asana project for the team,” is a game-changer. It turns Claude from a standalone chatbot you visit in a browser tab into an active layer on top of the tools you already use every day. For users, this means less context switching and manual copy-pasting. Basically, it makes the AI genuinely helpful, not just clever.
The Real Story is MCP, The Open Protocol
But the more significant long-term play isn’t the specific integrations—it’s the Model Context Protocol (MCP) they’re built on. By creating and then open-sourcing this protocol, Anthropic is trying to build the universal plug for AI. Think of it like USB-C for chatbots. They donated it to the Linux Foundation, which is a huge signal that they want this to be a neutral, industry-wide standard. And it’s working. The fact that OpenAI has adopted MCP is a massive endorsement. This move helps Anthropic position itself as a platform builder, not just a chatbot maker. It’s a strategic chess move against walled-garden approaches.
What This Means for Developers and the Market
For developers and other AI companies, this is potentially great news. An open standard like MCP, now stewarded by the Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation, lowers the barrier to building integrations. Instead of creating a custom connector for every AI model (Claude, GPT, Gemini, etc.), a developer can build one MCP server and, in theory, have it work across multiple platforms. This accelerates the entire ecosystem. For the enterprise market, it promises more choice and less vendor lock-in. If your business tools all speak MCP, you could more easily switch your underlying AI provider. So, while today’s news is about Claude getting more powerful, the underlying trend is about the AI industry maturing and standardizing. That’s arguably more important.
