Anthropic has introduced three new types of artifacts that show the company tiptoeing into the office productivity market long dominated by Microsoft and Google.
On Tuesday, the Claudefather announced Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards, and Claude Data, and promised the imminent arrival of Claude Meetings. These artifact types join existing ones – Docs, Slides, Design, and Motion – to form a nascent Claude-dependent productivity suite.
Anthropic initially used the term artifacts to refer to shareable AI-based interactive tools, like dynamic charts. But the scope of the term has been stretched to cover specific artifact types, which refer to what traditionalists might take to mean files associated with specific hosted applications.
“An artifact is anything Claude makes for you that you’d put in front of someone: a design, a deck, a document, a dashboard, or a small interactive tool,” the company explains.
The key thing that distinguishes an artifact from a file is that users are meant to interact with artifacts through Claude, rather than storing and transferring them independently. Think of it more as a container or managed object that opens in Claude (via a sharing URL), because artifacts in fact consist of various content types – .txt, .md, .html, .jsx, .svg, .pptx, .docx, .zip, .pdf, and .mp4, among others.
Anthropic’s vision of Claude as a container for other applications goes beyond artifacts. The AI biz has also expanded its interactive connectors, which turn Claude into a landlord for other software applications. Its own promotional video for the feature hammers that point home in its title: “Your apps have moved into Claude.”
“Starting today, partners can embed their apps directly in Claude, so you can work in Adobe, Atlassian, and others without switching tabs,” Anthropic said. “Plugins from Salesforce (beta), NetSuite, and Workday (beta) come with built-in skills, so sellers can prep for a call, accountants can analyze financial data, and HR teams can handle time off and expenses.”
In a prior era, those would be fighting words. Tech companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have worked for years to maintain their positions as platform landlords. Anthropic’s invitation to become a Claude tenant ought to set off competition alarm bells. But perhaps with LLMs being able to re-create other people’s apps on demand, there’s less interest in defending app boundaries as if they were moats to keep out rivals. With AI, the call is coming from inside the house.
Alongside the rollout of Claude Sheets, Whiteboards, and Data, Anthropic is pushing the notion that Claude is useful for people working outside of computation and mathematics, the occupational category that, according to the company’s own data, accounts for a larger share of Claude usage than any other.
“Inside Anthropic, non-technical teams are starting to get as much out of Claude as our engineers,” the biz insists, hauling out canned testimonials from the likes of Accenture and Datadog.
If Anthropic can demonstrate that there’s an untapped market of non-coders who would welcome a Claude subscription, investors in the company’s pending IPO will be glad to see it. ®