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 Fig …
