Anthropic has just announced the launch of a suite of AI-infused office software, a move that will reportedly endanger Microsoft and Google’s stranglehold on productivity tools.
Anthropic said in a blog post Tuesday that it is expanding its current office tools offering with three new features: Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards and Claude Meetings. Of the lineup, Claude Sheets appears to be the most direct threat to competitors, particularly Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. It works almost exactly like those two apps, but Anthropic is promoting it as a tool that workers can use to collaborate with both their team members and Claude Agents. The team will be able to use Claude to “organize data, create and edit formulas, and work across tabs,” Anthropic said.
Claude Whiteboards is a digital whiteboard that team members can use together to brainstorm ideas in a meeting, similar to how a shared Google Doc might be used, and Claude is also integrated to summarize the results. Whiteboards and spreadsheets are available in beta for Claude subscribers.
Claude Meetings, which Anthropic said is coming soon, will be a video call assistant that takes notes and updates company documents throughout the call, and could compete with Microsoft and Google’s own agent meeting features, as well as other AI-powered transcription and note-taking programs like Otter.ai.
Anthropic appears to be hoping that integrating Claude will make the products more attractive than its competitors’ offerings.
“Since Claude carries the same context at every step, an idea can be transferred from a whiteboard to a spreadsheet to a dashboard, without the need to reiterate details,” Anthropic said in the blog post.
The announcement comes as Anthropic looks to rebuild the hype around the company. The AI lab is reportedly looking to make its stock market debut next week, on November 19, despite growing market nervousness around the entire AI sector.
The AI hype has been put to the test over the past two weeks. The tech-heavy Nasdaq suffered its worst month in more than a year last month, driven by disappointing earnings reports and growing concerns that investments in AI won’t translate into enough revenue to justify its high price. Then, last week, the AI industry was dealt a major blow in the midterm elections when the American public voted overwhelmingly against building AI data centers. The final blow came over the weekend when Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admitted to having an affair with a woman now suspected of being a Chinese spy, sending the company’s shares plummeting.
All of these factors make Anthropic’s IPO even more precarious than it already was. Reports already paint a picture of worried investors who have been disappointed by Anthropic’s slowing revenue growth, revealed during the IPO filing. Anthropic is now targeting a valuation of about $1.33 trillion in its IPO, according to the Wall Street Journal, a figure that is a few hundred billion dollars lower than previous expectations of $2 trillion.
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