[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Anthropic can now offer Claude in Microsoft Office in a way similar to Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Anthropic said on May 8 that Claude for Excel, PowerPoint and Word has reached general availability, and Outlook has entered public beta.

Paid enterprise users of Microsoft 365 exceed 450 million. Copilot, an AI assistant Microsoft offers to those users, posted 20 million paid users as of the latest quarter. That is a 4.4 percent penetration rate.

For Anthropic, that means it can deploy Claude to 430 million people.

With the Office integration, Claude for Microsoft 365 users can continue the same conversation even if they move from Excel to PowerPoint, Word or Outlook.

Aakash Gupta (아카시 굽타), who runs the AI PM (Product Management) newsletter and podcast, said it eliminated “the most expensive friction in AI productivity work, the problem of having to re-enter prompts every time you switch apps.” He said, “This was the core value Microsoft Copilot’s ‘Work IQ’ put forward. Anthropic has launched equivalent functions in Microsoft’s backyard.”

Microsoft runs Copilot based on OpenAI models, but has opened Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook to AI that competes with OpenAI. Gupta said, “Microsoft’s real product is the platform. If it blocks Claude, it could face scrutiny from antitrust regulators for pushing only its own product. If it accepts Claude, it becomes harder for users to leave Office. Microsoft wins either way. The moat OpenAI enjoyed inside Office has become the same.”