On the eve of its IPO, Anthropic pointed its blade at Microsoft and Google's most solid office strongholds. At an event on Tuesday, the Claude developer rolled out a batch of new tools embedded in everyday office work, aiming to get a slice of the action in scenarios such as spreadsheets, video meetings, and data dashboards that Microsoft and Google rely on for their livelihood.
Claude Sheets Arrives, but First Admits to Being "Basic"
The new tools include a video call assistant, data dashboards, and a spreadsheet service called Claude Sheets—it looks a lot like Excel and Google Sheets, only with Anthropic's AI built in. Most of the new features will be available in beta to paying users. But product lead Nicholas Lin deliberately tamped down expectations: Claude Sheets is currently "quite basic" and cannot do high-level work such as financial modeling; when it really encounters complex spreadsheets, existing software add-ins are actually more useful.
Both Partner and Rival
What is more delicate is its identity. Anthropic also announced that it will allow companies such as Adobe, Atlassian, and HubSpot to embed a version of their own apps into Claude. It is both a partner to these companies and a potential replacement for them—this year, the concern that "AI will eventually make traditional enterprise software obsolete" has repeatedly heated up. Right now, Anthropic is riding high: documents disclosed on Tuesday show that as of October 31, its annualized revenue had reached $81 billion, up another $10 billion from the end of September, with a target IPO valuation of about $1.4 trillion. On the news front, as of noon New York time, Microsoft shares fell 3% in response.
