Anthropic PBC made an announcement late last month that flew under the radar. Having sparked selloffs in the equity market with a relentless stream of product updates, the company wanted to avoid rattling investors more. Its livestream wasn’t widely announced; there was no accompanying blog post. But the launch was about as meaningful as anything the artificial intelligence lab has lobbed into the market recently.

The company, which has aggressively pushed into the enterprise business with "agents” that carry out tasks, announced new updates to its tool Claude Cowork that extend its abilities to areas like human resources, investment banking and design. To do this, Anthropic worked with several companies, including FactSet Research Systems, S&P Global and PriceWaterhouseCoopers, to make those capabilities possible through so-called plug-ins.

A plug-in is like a mini-app inside of Claude Cowork that augments the AI tool with a new skill, such as financial analysis. FactSet, for instance, co-developed three plug-ins for Claude Cowork, according to Anthropic, which do things like draft research notes, compare consensus estimates and update financial models.

This is great for Claude — but what’s in it for FactSet or these other third parties? Anthropic only makes a vague suggestion that being plugged into its AI will make partner products stickier. "The more........

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