Anthropic has launched new features for its Claude AI chatbot, including Integrations and Advanced Research, which expands Claude’s ability to search across the web and enterprise data. These features are now in beta for users on the Claude Max, Team, and Enterprise plans, with Claude Pro support coming soon.
Additionally, Anthropic has increased the rate limits for Claude Code, its AI-powered coding assistant, for Max customers. These moves aim to keep Anthropic competitive with other major AI players like OpenAI and Google.
Integrations: Connecting Claude to the Tools You Use
The new Integrations feature is built on Anthropic’s MCP protocol, enabling Claude to access data from business apps, content repositories, and development environments. Developers can build app servers that extend Claude’s capabilities, and users can connect them directly.
“When you connect your tools to Claude, it gains deep context about your work — understanding project histories, task statuses, and organizational knowledge — and can take actions across every surface” wrote Anthropic in a blog post.
Initial integrations come from partners like Atlassian, Zapier, Cloudflare, Intercom, Square, and PayPal. For example, the Atlassian integration lets Claude generate and summarize pages in Confluence, while the Zapier integration connects Claude to a variety of app automation workflows.
Advanced Research: A More Powerful Way to Investigate Topics
Advanced Research allows Claude to perform deep dives into topics by crawling “hundreds” of internal and external sources. The resulting reports take between 5 to 45 minutes, offering more depth and precision than before. It can also search local files via MCP-connected drives when using the Claude Desktop app.
“With its new ability to do more complex research, available when you toggle on the Research button, Claude breaks down your request into smaller parts, investigating each deeply before compiling a comprehensive report,” said Anthropic.
Claude also provides citations for sourced material, linking directly to the original documents for transparency.
Competing in the Race for Reasoning AI
Anthropic’s updates come amid a wave of deep research features from competitors like Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and xAI’s Grok. These tools are powered by advanced reasoning models — AI systems that can break down complex problems, fact-check results, and generate more reliable insights.
Previously, Claude’s research capabilities were fast, but more superficial, partly due to the absence of a true reasoning model. The new Advanced Research is designed to address that limitation.
Big Goals, Long Road
Anthropic is aiming high: reports suggest the company is targeting $34.5 billion in revenue by 2027, while its annualized revenue in early 2024 was about $1.4 billion. While features like Integrations and Advanced Research represent major steps forward, there’s still a long way to go in the increasingly competitive AI landscape.
