Anthropic is rolling out Claude features on Salesforce's Slack, a major enterprise communications platform. Microsoft is also developing a feature that would allow Claude to be used on Teams, which competes with Slack.

That would mean Claude, rather than AI from Microsoft or Salesforce, can be used on Teams and Slack, the two dominant players in the enterprise messenger market.

Both Microsoft and Salesforce have their own AI agent product lineups, yet they have opened the door for Claude to come in.

This is not preferential treatment for Claude. Both companies have their own AI agents, but they are pursuing an app store-style platform strategy that allows customers to use the AI agent they want, including Claude.

Claude Tag, which Anthropic released for Slack, supports Slack users by letting them summon Claude during group chats to review communications and handle tasks.

Anthropic adds always-on AI teammate 'Claude Tag' to Slack

Anthropic is also expected to offer a similar function on Microsoft Teams. A Claude agent for Teams is likely to compete with Copilot AI tools that Microsoft is pushing as a new growth engine. Teams already supports various AI services from outside companies, including coding AI Cursor and AI search Perplexity.

Salesforce, which is growing Slatbot as a new business that competes with Claude Tag, has allowed Claude to enter. On social media, Claude has also been relatively active in promoting its move into Slack.

But a different view can also be seen internally. According to a recent report by The Information, some within Salesforce worry that Claude Tag amounts to letting an enemy into the living room. It also highlighted that an Anthropic official last year mentioned developing a work chat app similar to Slack using Claude, and that Andrej Karpathy (안드레이 카파시), an AI industry figure at Anthropic, recently praised Claude Tag as a "new paradigm that changes the relationship between AI and humans."

Outside Salesforce, there are also responses saying it is hard to understand opening Slack to Claude. Parker Conrad (파커 콘랜드), CEO of HR SaaS company Rippling, said, "It was a really hard decision to understand that Salesforce opened Slack to Anthropic. It clearly seems like a mistake."

Some see Claude Tag as reminiscent of when website operators added Facebook's 'Like' button to their sites. The operators did so to provide visitors with more useful information, but it resulted in Facebook securing vast amounts of information about the content on websites.

Of course, Microsoft or Salesforce would not have opened the door to Claude without gaining something.

From Salesforce's perspective, the integration of Claude Tag drew attention to Slack, leading more Slack users to learn that Slack has AI agents, and that could be very positive for Salesforce's strategy, The Information reported.

In fact, Perplexity, which introduced a computer AI agent on the Slack app in April, is said to have increased weekly enterprise users on Slack by 17 percent after the Claude Tag announcement.

Microsoft's move can also be interpreted from the perspective of a platform-first strategy. Microsoft has already enabled customers to use Claude in its core apps, Excel, PowerPoint and Word. Satya Nadella (사티아 나델라), Microsoft CEO, said in April that Claude Office would help Microsoft strengthen its position among customers.