Anthropic tiptoes into MS Office territory

Anthropic, the AI startup, has recently introduced three new types of "artifacts" that are designed to enter the office productivity market, which has traditionally been dominated by Microsoft and Google. These new artifact types include Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards, and Claude Data, along with an upcoming Claude Meetings feature.

These new offerings join existing Claude products such as Docs, Slides, Design, and Motion, creating a nascent productivity suite tailored for Claude users. Initially, "artifacts" referred to shareable AI-based interactive tools, but the term has since been expanded to include specific artifact types, which are akin to files associated with specific hosted applications.

An artifact is essentially anything Claude creates for you that you would place in front of someone else, like a design, deck, document, dashboard, or interactive tool. These artifacts are meant to be interacted with through Claude, rather than being stored and transferred independently. The company describes an artifact as a container or managed object that opens within Claude via a sharing URL, with the content types varying from .txt, .md, .html, .jsx, .svg, .pptx, .docx, .zip, .pdf, and .mp4.

Anthropic's vision extends beyond artifacts, as the company has also introduced interactive connectors that transform Claude into a landlord for other software applications. This feature enables users to embed their apps directly into Claude, allowing for seamless collaboration without the need to switch between tabs. Partners can now integrate their apps, including those from Adobe, Atlassian, Salesforce, NetSuite, and Workday, among others, directly into Claude.

This move has set off competition alarm bells, as tech giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have long sought to maintain their positions as platform landlords. However, with the ability of large language models (LLMs) to recreate other people's apps on demand, there may be less interest in defending app boundaries as if they were moats to keep rivals out.

Anthropic's strategy appears to be to invite competition into Claude by making it a tenant for various applications. The company is pushing the notion that Claude is useful for people working outside of the traditional computation and mathematics occupational category, which accounts for a larger share of Claude usage than any other.

Anthropic insists that both technical and non-technical teams are benefiting from Claude, citing testimonials from companies like Accenture and Datadog. If Anthropic can demonstrate that there is an untapped market of non-coders who would welcome a Claude subscription, investors in the company's pending IPO will be pleased.