Anthropic’s Claude got a little lively today with a recent extension to MCP, an open-source protocol that allows AI agents to easily access tools and data on the Internet. Users will now be able to interact with applications directly within the Claude chatbot, allowing them to create and format Slack messages to colleagues and create presentations for clients in Canva without having to switch tabs.
Starting today, Anthropic says tools like Asana, Figma, Slack, and Canva will “open as interactive apps right in the chat.” While users could previously connect tools like Slack and Asana to the AI assistant, this meant text recovery. The company says the recent in-app integration means users can actually exploit the tool and “see, explore and refine results visually, rather than just reading about them.”
Many popular tools are already available directly from Claude. Anthropic says users can customize Canva decks in real time, format and view messages in Slack, create interactive charts with Hex or Amplitude, and manage projects with Asana or monday.com. Anthropic says Figma, Clay, and Box integrations are also available, and Salesforce tools like Data 360, Agentforce, and Customer 360 are “coming soon.”
The interactivity—sort of like an app within an app—resembles the “mini” apps built into messaging platforms like Telegram and Discord. The integration signals a shift in the way AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude will likely work in the future, becoming more operating systems than individual tools, creating an “app for everything” like Tencent’s WeChat in China. ChatGPT has already taken a step in this direction by launching its own app ecosystem last year.
Anthropic credits the Model Context Protocol (MCP) with enabling its application integration with Claude. The extension, called MCP Apps, “allows any MCP server to provide an interactive interface within any AI-enabled product – not just Claude,” which means other interactive app interfaces could soon be made available to other AI tools.
Operational standards such as MCP are critical to building useful product ecosystems because they avoid the need for companies to develop and maintain many different interfaces. MCP launched at Anthropic in 2024, but has been widely adopted by companies such as OpenAI, Google and Microsoft. Tardy last year, Anthropic donated it to the Linux Foundation and, along with other tech giants like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Block, Bloomberg, and Cloudflare, created a recent fund — the Agentic AI Foundation — to “advance open-source agentic AI.”