Anthropic releases Claude Tag, a virtual employee that works within slack

The product is similar to Anthropic’s popular agentic offerings Claude Code and Cowork. After an employee directs Claude Tag to complete a task, the bot will break that down into stages and work through them independently—delivering the final result to a team via Slack. Anthropic says Claude Tag has been designed with enterprises in mind and has features that let all members of a company access a single Claude “identity,” meaning all employees can collaborate with the same tool and hand off half-finished tasks to one another. 

“We see Claude Tag as an evolution of Claude Code,” Cat Wu, Anthropic’s head of product for Claude Code and Cowork, told Fortune. “Claude Code, CoWork, and chat are very single player, whereas Claude Tag is built to be interactive and multiplayer. When Claude Tag works in a channel, everyone can see it, and everyone can jump in, engage, and steer it in the right direction.”

The tool also learns from the company it’s embedded in over time. Anthropic says the bot can get up to speed on company information across channels without every user having to explain the context of each task. Within Anthropic, Claude Tag is already approving and incorporating 65% of the code changes the product team submits, according to Wu.

The release is part of a larger push into the enterprise market from Anthropic. As the company heads toward a likely IPO this year, the lab has been keen to court enterprise customers, who represent a more predictable and sustainable revenue base than direct consumer use.

Anthropic has been making recent gains in the market despite fierce competition from fellow AI labs like OpenAI and Big Tech companies such as Google. According to Ramp’s May AI Index, which draws on corporate spending data across more than 50,000 U.S. companies, Anthropic had pulled ahead of OpenAI in business adoption for the first time, with 34.4% of firms paying for its services against OpenAI’s 32.3%. Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool, was the primary driver of that shift.

The enterprise adoption gap

Some enterprises have been struggling to integrate AI into workflows across sprawling organizations. Among the reasons cited for the adoption lag are a lack of employee training, a struggle to consolidate company data often spread across siloed teams, and safety concerns about access to and leaking of sensitive company data. With Claude Tag, Anthropic will be hoping to ease some of these burdens by simplifying the product and embedding it where companies already operate day-to-day.

In response to the safety concerns, Anthropic says Claude Tag’s access to sensitive data and task-specific tools can be “very tightly scoped.” System administrators can specify which tools, information, and memories Claude should have access to and in which channels. This prevents Claude accessing the wrong tools and the wrong memories across teams. For example, a Claude used by the HR team won’t pass on information to the engineering team and vice versa. 

“If you’re handling very sensitive data, such as personnel data, you can also DM Claude Tag…so you can be confident that sensitive information doesn’t leak,” Wu added.

Administrators can also set limits for token spend, both for individual channels and the organization—likely an attempt to ease some of the simmering concerns about the cost of AI tools. 

Claude Tag also has an “ambient” behavior feature that allows the bot to proactively keep employees updated with information across the organization and follow up on threads or tasks that have been forgotten. The product will initially be released as a research preview on Slack for Claude Enterprise and Claude Team users, with further plans to expand access.

With the new release, Anthropic is taking on both startups and Big Tech companies that have already released tools that work like virtual employees. The offering will more directly challenge things like Salesforce’s Slackbot and AI start-ups like Viktor.