Anthropic Unveils Office Tools Ahead of IPO, Taking on Microsoft

Anthropic Unveils Office Tools Ahead of IPO, Taking on Microsoft Anthropic PBC is releasing a suite of tools that weave the company’s artificial intelligence capabilities into more everyday office work, a move that puts it in sharper competition with two of its backers: Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google. The features, set to be unveiled at a company event on Tuesday, include a video call assistant, a data dashboard tool and a spreadsheet service called Claude Sheets that closely resembles Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, but with Anthropic’s AI built into it. Many of the new tools are available in a beta format for paid users. Anthropic has been working to bolster adoption of its services among a broader mix of business professionals as it nears a landmark public listing later this month. The Claude maker has previously seen strong demand among software engineers for using its tools to streamline the process of writing and debugging code. For now, Claude Sheets is a “fairly basic” experience, said Nicholas Lin, an Anthropic product leader. It’s not aimed at more advanced work such as financial modeling, he said, noting that Anthropic’s plug-ins to existing spreadsheet software would be more effective in those cases. “I think there’s a time and place for these Microsoft and Google products, especially for more advanced enterprise use cases,” Lin said. “But we’re hoping to show new ways of working inside Claude as well.” Anthropic also announced a way for companies such as Adobe Inc., Atlassian Corp. and Hubspot Inc. to embed a version of their existing apps within Claude. Anthropic has emerged as a partner and competitor to these and other firms, sparking fears at various points this year that AI could one day render legacy enterprise software products obsolete. Sales continue to surge for Anthropic. The AI developer reported a revenue run rate of $81 billion as of Oct. 31, up $10 billion from the end of September, according to a filing on Tuesday. The company is now seeking a fully diluted valuation of about $1.4 trillion in its initial public offering.