Anthropic puts Claude inside video calls with new Meetings tool

The latest:

Claude can now sit in on a video call and start drafting the plan being discussed while participants are still talking. Anthropic announced Claude Meetings on Tuesday alongside Claude Whiteboards and Claude Sheets, a package of workplace features that moves its assistant from a chat window into the tools teams use to run projects. All three launched in beta.

Details:

• How it works: Teams add Claude to a video call as a visible participant, and it follows the conversation in real time, according to Anthropic. During the call it can draft the plan under discussion, map a timeline on a whiteboard, answer questions in the meeting chat, and pull information from connected work apps, such as last year’s figures.
• After the call: Meeting notes, action items and other materials Claude produced during the session are available afterward in claude.ai, the company said. Anthropic framed the pitch around timing: the work that follows a meeting usually begins once everyone hangs up, and the feature is meant to turn discussion into action before that.
• The guardrails: Claude identifies itself as a meeting participant and posts a notice in the meeting chat, Anthropic said. It will not join calls that include external guests unless an administrator authorizes it, and it leaves automatically if an external guest joins mid-call.
• Availability: Claude Meetings is in beta on Team and Enterprise plans and works with Google Meet at launch, with support for additional plans expected to follow. Anthropic did not name the other video platforms it intends to support or give a date for that expansion.
• Whiteboards: Anthropic describes Claude Whiteboards as a collaborative board where a team talks through a plan and Claude converts it into an organized visual workspace with timelines and deadlines. The company said people already brainstorm with Claude but had to copy results elsewhere to share them. Finished boards can become a document or a slide deck.
• Sheets: Claude Sheets lets teams create and jointly edit spreadsheets with the assistant, which can generate a working campaign tracker or hiring budget on request. Each file supports multiple tabs, formulas, formatting and dropdown menus, and Claude edits cells alongside users while outlining each change.
• Data and connectors: Claude Data, previously called Claude Dashboards, is now generally available and links Claude to a company’s data warehouse or CRM, returning dashboards, written data stories or narrated videos. New interactive connectors open full versions of Adobe, Atlassian and HubSpot inside Claude conversations.
• The competition: The launch lands weeks after OpenAI introduced workplace tools that let users collaborate with ChatGPT to visualize company information and build presentations. Meta has entered the same contest with its Muse AI agent, which builds mini-apps on the fly to complete specific tasks.

Background:

Both Anthropic and OpenAI are pushing assistant products toward the functions of a full office suite — documents, spreadsheets, dashboards and meetings — the territory Microsoft and Google have long dominated with Office and Workspace.

Between the lines:

The disclosure rules say as much about enterprise sales as about privacy. A tool that names itself in the chat, requires admin approval before sitting with outsiders and exits when an external guest joins is built for buyers with compliance departments — consistent with a beta limited to Team and Enterprise plans. The deeper shift is placement: connectors that open Adobe, Atlassian and HubSpot inside Claude make the assistant the surface, not the add-on.

What’s next

Watch for Anthropic to expand Claude Meetings beyond Google Meet and beyond Team and Enterprise plans, for the beta features to reach general availability, and for OpenAI’s and Meta’s next workplace releases.