Claude Gets Spreadsheets and a Call Assistant: Anthropic Takes On Microsoft and Google

For a long time, Claude was for most people just a chat window: you copy text in and take an answer out. Now Anthropic, judging by a Bloomberg report retold by TNW, is trying to move work out of the chat and into familiar office tools. And in doing so, it is stepping onto the territory of its own investors.

What exactly is being added

According to the available information, three new things are appearing in Claude. The first is Claude Sheets, that is, spreadsheets. The second is an assistant for video calls. The third is a dashboard tool that turns data into clear visual panels. Much of this is starting out in beta and is available only to paying users.

Picture a typical Monday for an analyst. Previously, they would export data from a CRM, paste it into Excel or Google Sheets, then copy chunks into a chat asking it to find anomalies, and then carry the answer back into the spreadsheet. If Sheets works inside Claude, that loop gets shorter: the model sees the whole spreadsheet and edits formulas and columns itself. The call assistant, in turn, is meant to handle the "who promised what in the meeting" problem, around which an entire market of standalone services has been built.

Why this is awkward for Microsoft and Google

The main intrigue here is not technological but business-related. Microsoft and Google are among Anthropic's investors, and at the same time they are the ones selling the most popular office suites with AI assistants: Copilot in Excel and Teams, Gemini in Sheets and Meet. Claude's new features compete with them directly.

This is not the first time "partners" have become rivals. But usually that happens between a platform and a startup. Here, a model developer that needs cloud capacity and distribution through large companies is simultaneously building a product that could take users away from them. How the investors will react is not clear from the available text.

Apps inside Claude

The second part of the news may turn out to be more important than the first. Adobe, Atlassian and HubSpot will be able to host their apps inside Claude. This is already platform logic rather than that of a standalone assistant: the user doesn't leave the chat for Jira or HubSpot, but works with them right in the conversation.

For product managers and founders, there are two practical takeaways.

• If your product is a thin layer on top of an LLM for spreadsheets, call notes or simple dashboards, check how much you differ from Claude's built-in features. A beta for paying users may soon become the standard.
• If you have a SaaS with an API, it makes sense to look at how to connect to Claude as a distribution channel. Large companies are already heading there.

What is still unknown

The source material is short, and many questions remain open. It is unclear how much the new features will cost and whether they are included in existing plans. There is no data on the date of general launch, on how well Sheets handles large files, or on whether it is compatible with Excel and Google Sheets formats. Nor is it stated how the call assistant handles confidential recordings, which is the number one question for enterprise customers.

For now, this is more a signal of direction than a finished product to migrate to. But the direction is clear: AI labs no longer want to be the "engine under the hood" of other companies' apps. They want to own the interface where a person spends their workday. Those building products around models need to decide in advance what they will be useful for once basic office scenarios arrive together with the model itself.