Anthropic’s cloud comes a little livelier today thanks to a new extension of MCP, the open-source protocol that allows AI agents to easily access tools and data over the Internet. Users will now be able to interact with apps directly inside the cloud chatbot, letting you compose and format Slack messages to coworkers and create presentations for clients in Canva without switching tabs.
To date, Anthropic said tools like Asana, Figma, Slack, and Canva will “open as interactive apps right inside chat.” While users could previously connect tools like Slack and Asana to an AI assistant, doing so meant getting text back. The company says the new in-app integration means users can actually engage with the tool and “view, search, and refine results, not just read about them.”
Many popular tools are already available for use directly in the cloud. Anthropic says users can customize Canva decks in real-time, format and preview Slack messages, create interactive charts with Hex or Amplitude, and manage projects with Asana or monday.com. There are also integrations for Figma, Clay and Box, Anthropic said, with Salesforce tools like Data 360, AgentForce and Customer 360 apps “coming soon.”
The interactivity – a few apps within an app – seems similar to the “mini” apps embedded inside messaging platforms like Telegram and Discord. This integration signals a change in the future of how AI platforms like ChatGPS and the cloud will likely operate, becoming more like operating systems than individual tools, an “everything app” like Tencent’s WeChat in China. ChatGPT has already taken a step in that direction by launching its own app ecosystem last year.
Anthropic credits the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, for its ability to integrate apps into the cloud. The extension, called MCP Apps, “lets any MCP server provide an interactive interface within any assistive AI product – not just the cloud,” meaning other interactive app interfaces may soon be on the way for other AI tools.
Operating standards like MCP are important for building a usable ecosystem of products because they save companies from having to develop and maintain many different interfaces. MCP began life at Anthropic in 2024 but has been widely adopted by companies including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft. Anthropic donated it to the Linux Foundation late last year and set up a new fund – the Agent AI Foundation – with other tech giants like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, AWS, Block, Bloomberg and Cloudflare to “advance open-source agentic AI”.
