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If you, or your company, uses Slack for communication and you have a love of its in-house assistant Slackbot, then you might want to look away. Anthropic has announced Claude Tag (@Claude), which is currently in research preview, and could eventually take over Slackbot's job. The company describes it as an always-on Claude with a single identity that everyone in a Slack channel can access. Everyone in a channel can summon it by typing @Claude, can see what their shared assistant is working on and can pick up conversations from where someone else had left off. 

Like other AI bots, it learns more about the kind of work the people in its channel do over time, so there's lesser and lesser need to explain things to it. The @Claude for the channel of a specific division or team can gather information from elsewhere in the organization, provided it has the permission to do so. If the admin enables "ambient" behavior, @Claude can even proactively update users in a channel about information from other parts of the organization that's relevant to them. It will also be able to follow-up on tasks that haven't gotten an update for a while. 

While its capabilities might sound risky and like they could lead to information leaks, Anthropic says @Claude's access to sensitive data and task-specific information and tools "can be very tightly scoped." A systems admin will have to specify which tools and information Claude Tag should have access to for each channel. "That means, for instance, that a Claude set up for legal work won't pass on memories to one for engineering, nor provide engineers access to any legal data or tools," Anthropic explained. 

Claude Tag will initially be available in research preview on Slack for Claude Enterprise and for Claude Team customers, but Anthropic is expected to expand its availability in the future.