Hey there,

Anthropic has spent the last year integrating Claude everywhere you actually work. First they connected to your codebases with Claude Code, and then it was your desktop and apps with Cowork. On Monday, Anthropic brought Claude to your team chats with their new Claude Tag. The idea is simple, you add Claude to a Slack channel and then tag it like you would a teammate. This week we’ll look at what Claude Tag is, how it works, and how you can start using it right now. 

What is Claude Tag?

Claude Tag lets you add @Claude to specific Slack channels and connect it to your tools, data, and codebases. Once you’ve added Claude to a channel, anyone can tag it with requests and it will begin working in the background. Its workflow is simple, it takes a request and breaks it down into smaller steps before working through them using whatever tools or context is necessary. When finished, it will reply within a thread with what it created. Claude Tag seems like the next evolution of Claude, designed to allow teams to never leave Slack and still get the benefits of Claude. It is currently available as a Beta for Enterprise and Team customers. 

How is it different from the older Claude integration?

For those who don’t know, there has been a version of Claude within Slack for a while now. You could message it directly and it would act as a personal assistant of sorts. This earlier version was tied to your account and was private to you alone. The new version is shared with the team and exists for everyone inside a Slack channel. So in other words, this Claude Tag is moving away from a private assistant and more towards an AI-powered teammate that anyone can see and interact with. 

The older version was also more static and reactive. It only responded and completed tasks when you directly asked it to. Claude Tag will be more proactive when added to a Slack channel by giving suggestions when unprompted and even following up on threads that have gone quiet. Perhaps the most important element of Claude Tag is that it learns as it goes. It understands and remembers the context of the channel. This ensures that you don't need to endlessly explain relevant information and allows Claude to work independently on tasks for extended periods of time. The new Claude Tag builds off of the old Claude integration by also enabling users to privately message Claude outside a team channel.

In their announcement blog, Anthropic explained just how impactful Claude Tag can be. They shared that “65% of our product team’s code is created by our internal version of Claude Tag”. This really shouldn’t be a surprise when we remember that Anthropic is known for using their own products to their fullest. Earlier this year they shared that Claude Cowork was created in large part thanks to Claude Code. 

My Thoughts

When you look at the products that Anthropic has put out over the last year, you can see a clear pattern. They have slowly been expanding Claude’s use cases from coding tasks to tool and desktop integration and now finally an updated Slack version. They are positioning themselves well to be the universal AI company for professionals in all disciplines and positions. One significant point to remember is that Claude Tag is only accessible for Enterprise and Team plans so the majority of users won’t see any benefit from this new product. The idea of having an “AI teammate” that's accessible to the entire team is an interesting idea. I’m interested to see whether Claude Tag will truly be used by a majority of members on a team or if it just turns into one “AI champion” consistently using it for everyone.