By Jeffrey Dastin
June 23 (Reuters) - Anthropic on Tuesday launched an artificial intelligence agent inside Salesforce's Slack app that can work alongside employees in group chats, deepening its push into the enterprise market that has emerged as a key battleground for AI startups.
Called Claude Tag, the tool lets users summon the company's AI agent into a Slack thread by typing @Claude, where it can read conversations, break down tasks and proactively flag relevant updates across an organization without
being asked.
The agent, which will retain context over time, is available in research preview to Claude Enterprise and Team customers, with plans to expand to other platforms, Anthropic said.
The move is the latest by Anthropic to build on strong early demand for its AI tools from businesses, which has helped push up its valuation to $965 billion, surpassing that of OpenAI.
Anthropic said administrators can tightly control the data and tools that Claude Tag can access in each channel, helping protect sensitive information.
Cat Wu, Anthropic's head of product for Claude Code, said the AI program was a step apart from prior announcements because it would take action proactively in any given Slack channel, and multiple people could interact with it.
"A lot of the capabilities did exist, but actually the form factor of being able to tag it the same way that you would a coworker is really powerful," Wu told Reuters.
For instance, Wu said she gave her own Claude Tag access to Gmail so it reads her messages, flags when an important person writes to her, and then posts to her on Slack, where she said she is more responsive.
Anthropic is working to bring this capability to other platforms in the coming weeks, she said.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Anhata Rooprai in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva)
