# Anthropic’s Claude Gains App Integrations and Enhanced Research Capabilities

## Anthropic’s Claude Gains App Integrations and Enhanced Research Capabilities

Anthropic is leveling up its AI chatbot, Claude, with the launch of new features designed to boost its utility and performance. Announced Thursday, the updates include expanded app connectivity and more robust research capabilities, aiming to keep Claude competitive against rivals like Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The centerpiece of the update is the “Integrations” feature, currently in beta for Claude Max, Team, Enterprise, and soon Pro subscribers. Integrations allow users to connect Claude to a wider range of applications and tools, effectively expanding the chatbot’s knowledge base and action capabilities. This feature leverages Anthropic’s MCP protocol, enabling AI models to draw data from various sources like business tools, content repositories, and app development environments. Developers can now create and host app servers that integrate directly with Claude, enriching its functionalities.

According to Anthropic, connecting tools to Claude provides it with deeper context about users’ work, including project histories, task statuses, and organizational knowledge. This allows Claude to take actions across different platforms and workflows.

Several integrations from Anthropic’s partners are already available, including connections to Atlassian, Zapier, Cloudflare, Intercom, Square, and PayPal. For example, the Atlassian integration empowers Claude to summarize and create pages within Atlassian’s Confluence software, while the Zapier integration allows Claude to tap into its app automation workflows.

In addition to Integrations, Anthropic is also introducing “Advanced Research,” also in beta. This feature enables Claude to crawl “hundreds” of internal and external sources to deliver comprehensive reports on a given topic. Anthropic claims these reports can be generated in five to 45 minutes and leverage Claude’s expanded connectivity through Integrations. When using the Claude Desktop app on macOS or Windows, Advanced Research can also access MCP-connected local systems. The tool provides clear citations, linking directly to the original material, when incorporating information from external sources.

These additions place Anthropic in direct competition with similar “deep research” tools launched by Google (Gemini), Microsoft (Copilot), and xAI (Grok). These tools rely on AI reasoning models capable of critical thinking and self-fact-checking to perform in-depth research.

Anthropic’s previous research tool was known for its speed, compiling reports in around a minute. However, the results were often considered less thorough due to the lack of a robust reasoning model. With Advanced Research, Anthropic aims to address this limitation, providing a more comprehensive and reliable research experience.

Alongside these major updates, Anthropic has also increased the rate limits for its AI-powered coding tool, Claude Code, for Max customers. These enhancements reflect Anthropic’s continued efforts to bolster Claude’s capabilities and solidify its position in the competitive AI chatbot landscape as the company hopes to reach $34.5 billion in revenue by 2027.