On Thursday, humanity launched a new way to connect apps and tools to the AI chatbot Claude, as well as an expanded “deep research” feature that allows Claude to search the web, enterprise accounts and more.
A new app connectivity feature called Integrations and an expanded Deep Research Tool called Advanced Research is available in beta for Anthropic's Claude Max, Team, and Enterprise Plans subscribers. In related news, humanity has increased rate limits for Claude Code, an AI-powered coding tool for Max customers.
Integration and advanced research are part of humanity's efforts to address competing chatbots such as Google's Gemini and Openai's ChatGpt. Humanity hopes to reach $34.5 billion in revenue in 2027, and while it is certainly invading, there is a long way to go. According to one report, human annual revenues were around $1.4 billion in early March.
The integration is based on the company's MCP protocol. This allows AI models to draw data from sources such as business tools and draw data from content repository and app development environments. The integration taps MCP to allow developers to create and host app servers that enhance Claude's functionality, allowing users to discover and connect to Claude.
“Connecting tools to Claude gives you a deep context about your work and allows you to take action across all surfaces in understanding project history, task status, and organizational knowledge,” writes Mankind in a blog post.
First, there are several integrations from human partners, including Atlassian, Zapier, CloudFlare, Intercom, Square, and PayPal. Each one expands what Claude can do. For example, the Atlassian integration allows Claude to summarise and create pages in Atlassian's Confluence Workplace Software, while the Zapier integration allows Claude to connect to previous app automation workflows.
As for the launch of other new Claude features today, Claude can crawl “hundreds” of internal and external sources to provide what humanity describes as “more inclusive” reports in 5-45 minutes. Advanced research allows you to leverage Claude's new, expanded connectors, search across integrations, and if you use the Claude desktop app on Macos or Windows, you have a local drive connected to the MCP.
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“With the new ability to do more complex research available when switching research buttons, Claude breaks down the requirements into smaller pieces and explores each in-depth before compiling a comprehensive report,” continued the blog post. “When Claude incorporates information from a source, it provides clear citations that link directly to the original material.”
There were many deep research tools that have recently been launched across chatbots such as Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot, and Xai's Grok. Driving them is a “inference” AI model, with the ability to fact-check yourself through problems. This is probably important for conducting detailed research on subjects.
Anthropic's research tools were previously one of the faster tools in the deeper research category, and it took about a minute to edit the report. However, the results tended to be shallow as the studies did not employ inference models.