Claude Integration and MCP Are Eating the World

Anthropic recently released a couple of great new features. One is web search, which arrived after major competitors like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Mistral had already added similar capabilities to their chat apps a long time ago.

But that's not the whole story. They also released another feature called Integrations.

If you haven't read about it, I suggest you do.

Here is the official announcement also on X:

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Anthropic
@AnthropicAI
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May 1
Today we're announcing Integrations, a new way to connect your apps and tools to Claude.

We're also expanding Claude's Research capabilities with an advanced mode that searches the web, your Google Workspace, and now your Integrations too.

To put it mildly, this is and will change the entire digital economy.

I expect it to be the start of a new wave of GenAI progress in the coming months and year, and Anthropic has begun it expertly.

Why This is a Big Deal

Well, the entire GenAI trend we've seen so far has typically relied on a few sources of information:

• The data the language model (like GPT or Claude) already knows from its training.
• Data from the internet if the model had access to it.
• Optionally, documents you uploaded during conversations.

This is mainly how it worked for everyday users, not large businesses who have the resources to connect APIs and applications automatically for things like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), data analysis, and other business situations.

But for ordinary people, and even for most business uses until now, if you wanted to use AI's intelligence, you had to look for and gather the necessary data for a reliable answer (for example, upload your invoice, a letter from authorities, generating business slides, or whatever).

Let's say, for instance, you want AI to help you plan your trip.

You would typically have to:

• Go to, say, Skyscanner, choose a few flights.
• Check Booking.com.
• Look at TripAdvisor.
• And many more...

Some information is available on the public internet, so it might already be accessible via web search directly from the AI. But some data isn't, or at least isn't complete, like information about specific hotels or flights in this example.

With Claude Integration, this manual work is becoming a thing of the past.

Claude has released a technology you might have heard of called MCP.

This technology connects your AI (Claude, GPT or whatever) to external data sources such as your email, cloud storage, CMS and hundreds if not thousands of other sources.

Source: a16z.com

Until now, MCP required installing and setting up APIs on your computer. With Claude Integration, this is no longer necessary because Anthropic has built it into their app using a feature called Server-Side-Events.

Please note that the Claude Integration feature is currently only available to users on the Max Plan, which costs $100 and above. But I expect it to be released for Pro users soon.

As of today, Claude Max users can now add external data sources at the click of a button