Anthropic has upgraded its AI assistant Claude, adding Research, an autonomous capability that integrates with Google Workspace. Claude can now search and reference content in Google Docs as well as communications in Gmail and events in Calendar. “With Research, Claude can search across both your internal work context and the web to help you make decisions and take action faster than before,” Anthropic explains, turning the model into a “true virtual collaborator” for enterprise clients. The expansion puts Anthropic into more direct competition with OpenAI and Microsoft as well as Google with Gemini in the AI productivity space.

“Research transforms how Claude finds and reasons with information,” Anthropic notes in a news post, explaining that it allows the AI assistant to operate agentically, “conducting multiple searches that build on each other while determining exactly what to investigate next.”

Research is now available in early beta for Max, Team, and Enterprise plans in the United States, Japan, and Brazil, according to Anthropic, which instructs users to “simply toggle on the Research setting in chat” to active the feature.

The Google Workspace integration is available in beta to all paid individual users in profile settings. For those using Claude through Team and Enterprise subscriptions, plan admins must enable Google Workspace access domain-wide before individual users connect their accounts.

“Claude Enterprise plan admins can enable Google Docs cataloging for the entire organization,” Anthropic says, a reference to indexing the content.

TechCrunch explains that while “Google DeepMind’s Gemini chatbot also integrates with Workspace, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT integrates with Google Drive,” Anthropic is an early mover among third-party AI companies to offer connectivity through the entire Google suite of business apps.

“Anthropic’s team-up with Google aims to give Claude more personally tailored responses without requiring users to repeatedly upload files or craft detailed prompts,” TechCrunch reports. “OpenAI and Google have tried achieving the same effect via different approaches, such as adding memory features that allow chatbots to reference past conversations in their replies.”

Anthropic is positioning Claude’s Research capability “as dramatically faster than competing solutions, promising comprehensive answers in minutes rather than the ‘up to 30 minutes’ they claim rival products require,” writes VentureBeat, quoting an Anthropic spokesperson saying “Research is a tool to help enterprise workers get well-researched answers to queries in less than a minute.” And it does so parsing sources that include proprietary corporate information.