After making fun of Sam Altman’s company, Anthropic goes after OpenAI’s biggest investor Microsoft

After poking fun at rival Sam Altman’s OpenAI, Anthropic is now targeting OpenAI’s biggest investor Microsoft, with a bold enterprise play. AI giant Anthropic unveiled ‘Cowork and Plugins for the Enterprise’, which is a suite of tools that embed its model Claude directly into everyday workplace applications like Excel, PowerPoint, and Slack. Instead of copying chatbot outputs into documents, Claude now operates inside these programs, carrying context seamlessly across workflows.

Anthropic challenging Microsoft 365 Copilot

This latest move of Anthropic comes across as a clearest attempt of the company to challenge Microsoft’s dominance in enterprise AI. Microsoft has already incorporated its 365 Copilot across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, while offering Copilot Studio for custom AI agents. On the other hand, OpenAI also recently launched Frontier, its enterprise platform built on ChatGPT, and Google and Amazon have also rolled out similar integrations with Gemini and Quick Suite.

Anthropic’s Plugins and Connectors

At the heart of Anthropic’s launch are customizable plugins—specialized AI agents for roles like finance, HR, design, and operations. These plugins are open-source and portable, giving companies flexibility to adapt them without being locked into one ecosystem. Anthropic also introduced connectors to platforms such as Google Drive, Gmail, and DocuSign, enabling Claude to access live enterprise data under strict administrative controls.

Cowork includes a growing library of plugins for common knowledge work — including sales, finance, legal, marketing, HR, engineering, design, operations, data analysis, and more. Each one comes pre-configured with the skills, connectors, and commands relevant to that function.

How to install a plugin

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• li1Open the Claude Desktop app and switch to the “Cowork” tab.
• li1Click the “Customize” menu in the left sidebar, which brings together your plugins, skills, and connectors in one place.
• li1Click “Browse plugins” to open a modal where you can view all the available options.
• li1Click “Install” on your selected plugin.
• li1You can also upload a custom plugin file if you've built one yourself or received one from a colleague.

Plugins you add yourself are saved locally to your machine.