Anthropic updated Claude with a feature called Integrations that will enable the chatbot to access data from third-party cloud services. The company rolled out the capability alongside an enhanced version of Research, a tool it introduced last month. The latter feature enables Claude to prepare detailed reports about user-specified topics. Research can now perform the task more thoroughly than before. The new Integrations capability will enable Claude to incorporate data from software-as-a-service applications into its prompt responses. If customers wish to connect Claude to an application for which a prepackaged integration isn’t available, they can build their own. Anthropic estimates that the process takes as little as 30 minutes. According to the company, developers can further speed up the workflow by using a set of tools that Cloudflare introduced in March to ease such projects. Claude’s new connectors are powered by MCP, a data transfer technology that Anthropic open-sourced. It provides software building blocks that reduce the amount of work involved in connecting a LLM to external applications. OpenAI, Anthropic’s top competitor, rolled out MCP support to its Agents SDK last month. Anthropic added MCP to Claude immediately after open-sourcing the technology last year. Until now, however, the chatbot only supported connections to applications installed on the user’s computer, which limited the feature’s usefulness.