Anthropic debuts Claude Tag, a more capable AI teammate that lives within Slack

Anthropic PBC today unveiled a new version of its chatbot Claude that lives inside Slack, where it operates like a virtual employee.

It’s called Claude Tag, and it’s designed to work across entire organizations, helping multiple employees complete tasks for related projects. It builds on existing agentic artificial intelligence tools offered by Anthropic, including Claude Code and Claude Cowork.

When an employee directs it to complete a task, the bot will break down everything it needs to accomplish this into a series of steps. Then it will complete them all independently, before the final result of that work is delivered to the team via Slack.

According to Anthropic, Claude Tag is accessible to all employees within a company via a single Claude “identity,” which means everyone gets to use the same tool. That makes it possible for people to hand off half-finished tasks to other team members, who’ll be able to pick up where they left off.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Claude in Slack. The company already offers an existing integration that allows users to message @Claude or tag it in various channels to obtain help on-demand. Claude Code can also be summoned in Slack to route coding tasks from a channel mention to a full coding session, and then post updates back in the Slack thread.

Context matters

What Claude Tag does differently is that it adds a persistent context layer and memory that allows it to learn more about the different projects people are working on. If given permission, it can search through additional Slack channels elsewhere in an organization to obtain the information and context it needs to complete different tasks.

Another advantage is that everyone within a Slack channel where Claude Tag lives can access it to see what it has been working on, and pick up conversations from where others left off. Administrators can select which channels, tools and information they want to give a Claude Tag identity access to, and then it will remain within those channels. Teams can then set up a different Claude Tag identity for other projects, so one that’s working for the legal department won’t start digging up information in the engineering team’s channel, for example.

Claude Tag will post updates in the relevant Slack channels when it has been assigned a task, and there’s also an ambient mode available that will jump into chats proactively when it thinks it’s necessary to post an update, flag something important, or remind people about things that might have been forgotten. In this way, the company said, Claude Tag feels as if “you’re working with a real colleague… that can produce work in public view, with far greater context and understanding than before.”

The launch of Claude Tag is designed to help Anthropic expand its push into the enterprise AI market as it nears an initial public offering that’s expected to take place later this year. The company has been striving to win over enterprises over the last year, as business users provide a more stable and predictable revenue stream than consumers do.

Anthropic’s strategy has been going well, and it has managed to fend off stiff competition from rivals such as OpenAI Group PBC and Google LLC. According to Ramp Business Corp.’s latest AI Index, which looks at corporate spending data from more than 50,000 U.S. companies, Anthropic pulled ahead of OpenAI in May, with 34.4% of firms having a Claude subscription, compared with 32.3% that use OpenAI’s tools. It says Claude Code is the main driver of this growth.

The enhanced context provided by Claude Tag may help Anthropic further accelerate its enterprise adoption, but it isn’t the only AI firm pushing to give its AI models greater understanding of customer’s businesses. Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot and Work IQ can tap into knowledge graphs, while Glean Technologies Inc. is developing enterprise-grade agents built on an “intelligence layer” that sits between the underlying AI model and an organization’s data. Similarly, Databricks Inc. and Snowflake Inc. are building out their own intelligence layers for third-party AI agents to tap into.

Image: Anthropic