Anthropic’s Claude can now read your Gmail

Anthropic made an announcement on Tuesday about the integration of its AI chatbot, Claude, with Google Workspace. This integration allows Claude to search and reference emails in Gmail, scheduled events in Google Calendar, and documents in Google Docs.

The integration is initially rolling out in beta to subscribers of Anthropic’s Max, Team, Enterprise, and Pro plans. Administrators handling multi-user accounts need to enable the integration before users can connect their Google Workspace and Claude accounts.

Google DeepMind’s Gemini chatbot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT also integrate with Workspace, but Anthropic is among the first third-party AI companies to closely connect with Google’s productivity suite.

The collaboration between Anthropic and Google aims to provide Claude with more personalized responses without users having to repeatedly upload files or create detailed prompts. This new integration can help users organize both their professional and personal lives.

Claude will offer in-line citations when referencing Workspace content, ensuring users know the origin of specific information.

Despite not being able to schedule events or send emails, security concerns may arise regarding the extent of Claude’s search capabilities within a user’s Google Workspace. Anthropic assures that strict authentication and access control mechanisms are in place to safeguard user data.

In response to these concerns, an Anthropic spokesperson emphasized that Claude doesn’t train models on user data by default and implements secure authentication and access control measures for external services.

Anthropic also introduced Claude Research, a feature that conducts multiple web searches to provide detailed answers. This feature is positioned as a competitor to other “deep research” agents and offers a balance between speed and comprehensiveness.

Claude Research is being rolled out to subscribers of Max, Team, and Enterprise plans in the United States, Japan, and Brazil, with availability for Pro customers coming soon.

These updates reflect Anthropic’s ongoing efforts to enhance Claude’s capabilities and attract users to its AI subscription plans.