Anthropic wants Claude to be a teammate, rather than a tool.
On Tuesday, the company unveiled Claude Tag, a system that embeds its flagship model into Slack, allowing it to "join as a team member." This allows users to grant the model access to certain channels, tools or codebases, and delegate tasks to it by tagging Claude.
Anthropic noted that Claude builds context by remembering relevant information from the channels it's a part of, and uses it to plan and complete future tasks.
Claude Tag is currently available on Slack for Enterprise and Team customers and will expand to other work platforms in the future. In its blog post, Anthropic pointed out a few advantages of this system:
- The tool is "multiplayer," meaning that it interacts with everyone in the channels it's in, and anyone can transparently see what the model is working on, too. It can also pick up conversations where others left off.
- Claude Tag learns over time by following along with the channels it's in and building context about an organization, and it automatically learns from other channels and data sources when given permission. This negates the need for users to "explain things to it from scratch over and over again," Anthropic said.
- If "ambient" behavior is enabled, it keeps users apprised of information it thinks they need to know, and flags relevant information from different channels and tools.
- And it works asynchronously, allowing users to give Claude a task and allow it to work in the background. The tool can also schedule tasks for itself.
The company said that it sees Claude Tag as an evolution of Claude Code, and that it's "one of the main ways we get things done at Anthropic." In its blog post, the company said that 65% of its code is created by an internal version of the product.
"The same pattern is now spreading well beyond engineering—we’re tagging Claude to chase down product metrics and data, work through support tickets, or even help find the root cause of tricky bugs," Anthropic said in its blog post.
It's not the first time that Anthropic has sought to extend the success it's seen with Claude Code to other domains. In January, the company launched Claude Cowork, which gives knowledge workers an agent to autonomously handle tasks when given access to specific tools or folders. More recently, the company unveiled Claude Design, an AI tool that allows designers to iteratively build visual products using the chatbot.
Our Deeper View #
Anthropic leaning into Claude Tag is about more than just roping in more enterprise users. It marks an evolution in how enterprises and organizations view this technology. Anthropic positions Claude Tag as a digital teammate, akin to human coworkers, rather than a tool. Additionally, the fact that this is built into Slack, one of the most popular platforms for enterprise communication, further embeds that concept within businesses. However, this mindset shift brings up two potential concerns. For one, the more we think of these tools as coworkers, not as machines with built-in flaws in accuracy and data security, the more we must trust them, and the more risk we undertake at the same time. Additionally, this shift risks further growing the narrative that many experts warn against: that AI is ready to automate jobs and replace employees, rather than augment and empower them.