Anthropic launches Claude Integrations and advanced Research mode

Anthropic gave Claude the ability to connect to remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, extending a capability that had previously worked only locally through the Claude desktop app since MCP’s release the preceding November. Ten launch partners were connected at once, including Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence, Zapier, Cloudflare, Intercom, Asana, Square, Sentry, PayPal and Linear, with Stripe, GitLab and Box named as coming soon. The feature let Claude read and act on data held in a user’s own business tools rather than relying solely on what was pasted into a conversation, launching in beta on the Max, Team and Enterprise plans.

Alongside Integrations, Anthropic expanded Research, a mode in which Claude runs an open-ended investigation across the web, a user’s Google Workspace and, now, connected Integrations, rather than answering from a single pass. Anthropic said sessions could run anywhere from five to 45 minutes depending on the complexity of the query, though most completed within 15 minutes, with citations linking back to original sources.

The release fit a broader pattern across labs in 2025 of extending chat assistants toward acting on external systems rather than only answering questions inside a single context window — the same direction OpenAI, Google and others were pursuing with their own agentic and connector features that year.