Anthropic Launches 10 Claude Cowork Plugins for Investment Banking, HR and Design

Anthropic on Tuesday released 10 new plugins for its Claude Cowork agent platform, expanding the AI tool into investment banking, human resources, private equity and design, the company announced during a livestreamed event. The plugins, built with partners including FactSet, S&P Global and LSEG, let organizations deploy specialized AI agents across departments with the same IT controls they would expect from any enterprise software rollout. Claude can now also move between Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint without losing context, completing multi-step financial tasks in a single session.

Tuesday's release follows weeks of stock market damage triggered by Anthropic's earlier Cowork updates. A legal analysis plugin in early February wiped nearly $1 trillion from software stock valuations. Thomson Reuters plunged 16% in one session. LegalZoom sank almost 20%. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF closed down nearly 5% on Monday alone, hours before the latest announcement landed.

Anthropic has more than 300,000 business customers. Enterprise sales account for roughly 80% of revenue. The company closed a $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation two weeks ago. And it was not done for the day.

Every worker gets an agent

Anthropic's pitch on Tuesday was blunt: every knowledge worker should have a custom AI agent shaped around their company's data, workflows and institutional habits.

"We believe that the future of work means everybody having their own custom agent," product officer Matt Piccolella told TechCrunch. Jensen, Anthropic's head of Americas, was blunter. "2025 was meant to be the year agents transformed the enterprise, but the hype turned out to be mostly premature," she said. "It wasn't a failure of effort. It was a failure of approach."

Five of the new plugins target financial services directly. The investment banking plugin reviews transaction documents, builds comparable company analyses and prepares pitch materials. That is work junior bankers currently spend entire weekends doing. A private equity version extracts standardized data from large document sets, models scenarios and scores opportunities against deal criteria. Separate plugins cover equity research and wealth management. A fifth handles baseline financial analysis, modeling and PowerPoint quality checks.

The remaining five cover HR, engineering, operations, design and brand voice. The human resources plugin generates offer letters, onboarding plans and performance reviews. The design plugin produces critique frameworks, drafts UX copy and runs accessibility audits. Nobody puts "draft offer letter" on a strategic roadmap. But somebody writes one every week, in every department, and the documents end up in folders that get opened once.

Anthropic open-sourced all 10 on GitHub. Companies can run them stock, or gut the code and start over. Anthropic expects most organizations to customize the templates, encoding their own terminology and compliance rules into each one. Admins set up plugins from starter templates or build new ones with Claude's help, tailoring skills, slash commands and data connectors to match the specific organization.

The implied promise: AI as collaborator, not replacement. The stock market has not been buying it.

Inside the apps where work lives

The connectors that launched alongside the plugins were, in some ways, the bigger announcement.

New integrations with Google Workspace, DocuSign, FactSet, MSCI, Clay, Apollo, Outreach and Harvey give Claude direct access to live company data. Admins control which connectors get bundled into plugins and who can reach them. Companies can set up private marketplaces for their agents. Proprietary workflows stay internal. Private GitHub repos can host plugins too. Same version-control workflow developers already use for shipping code.

But the feature that reveals where Anthropic is heading sits inside a spreadsheet. The company shipped an Excel and PowerPoint integration that lets Claude move between the two applications and carry context as it goes. An equity analyst can ask the tool to pull earnings data, update a model in a spreadsheet and build a summary slide deck. One session. No copy-paste. No toggling between a chatbot window and the file where the actual work happens. If the inputs change, Claude propagates the update through the rest of the workflow automatically.

That matters because it collapses a process most analysts currently spread across three tools and two hours into something Claude can handle while you read the morning note. The cross-app capability shipped Tuesday as a research preview for all paid plans on Mac and Windows.

Enterprise AI has followed the same loop for years, Anthropic wrote in its blog post. "You go to the AI, get an answer, then go back to your actual tools to do the work." Scott White, head of product for enterprise, framed the company's ambitions more plainly. Anthropic views itself "as a platform, not a product, trying to own every workflow," he told CNN.

That language is careful. The product roadmap is not.

Partners piling on

Several data and financial services providers launched their own plugins alongside Anthropic's release, turning Tuesday into something closer to a coordinated industry event than a solo product launch.

S&P Global built a plugin bringing Capital IQ Pro data into Claude, with skills covering company tear sheets, industry transaction summaries and earnings call previews. LSEG's plugin provides direct access to market data for building DCF models with live yield curves, drafting morning notes with real-time pricing and analyzing deals with actual financing economics. Both landed in Anthropic's public finance plugin repository on Tuesday. Slack by Salesforce, Apollo and Common Room built plugins of their own.

Intuit announced a separate multi-year partnership on the same day. The deal integrates Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK directly into the Intuit platform, letting mid-market businesses build custom AI agents for tax, accounting and invoicing workflows. MCP integrations with TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp will surface Intuit's financial tools inside Cowork and Claude for Enterprise. A regional restaurant chain with 15 locations could, in Intuit's telling, deploy an agent that combines point-of-sale data with expense tracking to flag margin problems across every store. The partnership extends Claude's reach past the financial firms and consulting shops that dominate Anthropic's current customer list, and into the strip-mall accounting offices and franchise operations where Intuit has owned the market for decades.

PwC, L'Oreal, Deloitte and Thomson Reuters have all deployed custom Claude agents already, Anthropic said. PwC's Sanjay Subramanian called it a third wave of professional work. "Productivity tools, cloud and search, and now agentic AI," he said. The roster of companies attaching their products to Claude's platform grew longer on Tuesday than it had in the previous month combined.

Wall Street keeps flinching

The pattern is familiar by now. Anthropic ships a product. The sector it targets sells off.

The legal plugin in early February hammered the S&P North American Technology Software Index, which tracks 111 stocks, into a decline that has now reached 32%. An updated Opus model tuned for financial research dragged financial services shares lower the same week. Cybersecurity stocks fell Friday after Anthropic debuted a vulnerability scanning tool for Claude Code.

And then Monday happened. Anthropic published a blog post arguing that Claude Code could compress COBOL modernization projects, traditionally multi-year consulting engagements, into a few quarters. IBM has spent decades charging enterprises to maintain and upgrade the programming language that still runs much of the banking and insurance world. IBM's stock fell roughly 13% in a single session, the company's steepest loss since 2000. Indian IT firms including Infosys and Mphasis dropped more than 7%. Consultants who bill hundreds of millions annually for COBOL migration work watched their value proposition get questioned in a blog post.

White grew defensive. The market reactions were "a little bit of an overreach or overreaction," he said. Anthropic's tools help customers grow. They do not replace them.

Investors have heard this line before. And they sound increasingly anxious about what comes next. Each product launch targets a specific industry and is followed by a selloff in exactly that industry. Software incumbents look cornered. The market is not reacting to any single feature. It is pricing in velocity, ambition and the real possibility that a $380 billion startup moving at this pace will not stop where it claims it will.

"Panic over this is probably misplaced," Jacob Bourne, a technology analyst at eMarketer, told CNN. "But I think it does mean that legacy enterprise software providers are going to need to continue evolving."

A race nobody can afford to lose

Anthropic is not the only company chasing enterprise agents. OpenAI launched Frontier last month for building and managing AI agents at the corporate level. On Monday, OpenAI announced multiyear partnerships with four major consulting firms to embed its own engineers alongside Frontier deployments, a distribution play aimed at reaching enterprises through the advisors they already trust. Microsoft has Copilot inside every Office app already. Copilot Studio lets enterprises build custom agents on top. Google wove Gemini into Gmail and Workspace. Amazon offers Quick Suite.

Anthropic's edge comes from Claude Code, its AI coding tool, which Jensen called something "engineers just couldn't live without anymore." Over the past year Claude Code became the dominant AI coding assistant in a market where developer lock-in translates directly into enterprise contracts. The bet with Cowork is that the same stickiness can work for bankers, analysts, HR managers and designers. "We expect that every knowledge worker will feel that way about Cowork," Jensen told CNBC.

That is a company-defining wager for a startup valued higher than most of the firms whose stocks it keeps rattling. The plugins are open source and the connectors are live. Partners signed on before the event started. What happens next sits with the IT departments deciding whether to install Claude inside their spreadsheets, their slide decks and their deal rooms, or leave the browser tab closed.

OpenAI Launches Frontier to Manage AI Agents From Rival Vendors in One System

OpenAI on Thursday released Frontier, a platform that lets companies build, deploy, and manage AI agents from multiple vendors inside a single system. The product works with agents built by OpenAI, by

The Implicator

Anthropic's Safety Obsession Built a Shipping Machine. New Opus 4.6 Proves It.

On Tuesday, a single plugin wiped $300 billion off the stock market. Not a product launch. Not a platform. A plugin, released on a Friday afternoon by a company with fewer employees than a mid-size la

The Implicator

OpenAI Launches Codex Desktop App for macOS With Multi-Agent Workflows and Doubled Rate Limits

OpenAI released a macOS desktop app for Codex today, turning its AI coding agent into a standalone application that can run multiple agents across different projects at the same time. The company also

The Implicator