Artificial intelligence lab Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled 10 new ways for business customers to plug in its technology to key areas of their work, weeks after other releases sparked an aggressive selloff in traditional software company shares.
The San Francisco-based startup said its plug-ins could now help with investment banking tasks like reviewing deals, wealth-management tasks such as portfolio analysis and human resource-related tasks such as making new-hire materials reflect a brand’s tone and policies.
Other items that Anthropic touted included plug-ins for private equity, engineering and design.
Anthropic said its new plug-ins were developed with partners, including LSEG, FactSet, Salesforce’s Slack, and DocuSign.
Companies including Thomson Reuters, which owns Reuters news agency, and RBC Wealth Management were using AI agents powered by Anthropic, it said.
The announcement lifted the shares of Anthropic’s partner companies – Salesforce rose 4%, FactSet 5% and DocuSign nearly 6%.
Backed by Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com, the lab said it was releasing ways to connect its Claude AI to some commonly used business tools like Google Calendar and Gmail.
The rapid-fire releases this year show how Anthropic is seeking to get ahead of the pack in selling autonomous AI to the lucrative enterprise market ahead of a widely expected public offering.
Anthropic faces competition from Google itself, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI, among others. The startup has said it has not decided about going public.
Last month, Anthropic’s release of a legal plug-in ignited an $830 billion global selloff in software and services stocks, including some of the startup’s partners, over six trading days as investors worried that AI-powered automation could undercut a revenue streams of these companies.
Scott White, Anthropic’s head of product for enterprise, said the goal was for Claude to deliver better outcomes for customers, not replace them.
“It’s not a product that’s trying to own every workflow,” he said in an interview. “We’re providing infrastructure and intelligence so our partners or our customers can bring their business knowledge, their expertise, their trusted relationships and their customers to the equation.”
Companies can build and manage their own plug-ins as well, Anthropic said.
Anthropic digs in heels in dispute with Pentagon
The Pentagon has been negotiating AI contracts with multiple large language model, or LLM, providers, including Alphabet’s Google, xAI and OpenAI, that are set to shape the future of military use of artificial intelligence for battlefield applications, spanning autonomous drone swarms, robots and cyber attacks.
Until recently, Anthropic was the only LLM provider on classified networks. This week, the Pentagon announced it had reached an agreement with xAI to deploy it across classified networks. Reuters has previously reported that it plans to move all AI companies to classified networks.
The Pentagon’s fight with Anthropic reached a fever pitch earlier this month when it grew concerned that the company had asked questions about how its AI products were used during the Venezuela military raid that captured President Nicolas Maduro.
During the meeting with Hegseth, Amodei said Anthropic did not raise concerns to Palantir or the Pentagon about whether the company’s AI products were used during the Venezuela raid, the source said. Amodei also said the safeguards currently in place would not pose a problem to the Defense Department’s current operations.
Hegseth said the Pentagon would either invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to comply with its demands, or deem the company a supply chain risk, a determination typically imposed on companies from foreign adversaries. This could upend Anthropic’s business with other companies that do business with the U.S. government.
“This specific scenario is unprecedented and will almost certainly trigger a raft of downstream litigation if the Administration takes adverse action against Anthropic here,” said Franklin Turner, a government contracts lawyer at McCarter & English.
-Reuters
