Anthropic is connecting its Claude AI models to personal and business Google Workspace accounts, allowing the AI assistant to access information across Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. The move aims to make Claude a more effective collaborative partner by enabling it to securely analyze a user’s internal work context without needing manual file uploads. Alongside this, Anthropic introduced a “Research” capability, an agentic function that searches both connected Workspace data and the web to generate comprehensive, cited answers.
Bridging Personal Data and AI Reasoning
The core of the Google Workspace integration allows Claude, with user permission, to read emails, parse documents stored in Google Docs, and consult calendar schedules. This expands significantly on a more limited Google Docs connection Anthropic introduced in November 2024.
Anthropic suggests this access eliminates the need for users to repeatedly provide background information for tasks like meeting preparation or summarizing email threads. “Claude brings these insights directly to you, eliminating hours of manual work and letting you focus on strategic planning instead of information gathering,” the company stated in its announcement. When Claude uses information from these personal sources, it generates inline citations linking back to the specific email, document, or calendar event, a mechanism Anthropic promotes for verification.
The integration is now available in beta for all paid Claude users (Max, Team, and Enterprise plans), accessible via profile settings, though Team and Enterprise administrators must first enable it at the organization level. Anthropic provided several examples of how this combination might work: marketing teams could gather competitive intelligence from the web while pulling internal specs and strategy docs; sales teams could prep for meetings by having Claude search correspondence history and meeting notes alongside recent news about the prospect’s company; and engineers could analyze internal design documents alongside external API documentation. However, it lacks detail on granular privacy controls for non-Enterprise users wanting to potentially limit access within sensitive emails or documents.
Claude Goes Beyond Pre-Trained Knowledge
Complementing the Workspace access is the new Research feature, designed to tackle questions needing both internal context and current external information. Anthropic describes the feature’s mechanics: “Research transforms how Claude finds and reasons with information. Claude operates agentically, conducting multiple searches that build on each other while determining exactly what to investigate next.” This mode enables Claude to perform multi-step, iterative searches, exploring various angles of a query across a user’s connected Google data and the public web, aiming to provide thorough answers supported by citations from both internal and web sources.
This builds upon the web search capability Anthropic first rolled out in preview for US users on the Claude 3.7 Sonnet model back on March 20, 2025. The Research feature is now available in early beta for users on Max, Team, and Enterprise plans in the US, Japan, and Brazil, activated via a toggle in the chat interface. The standalone web search function has also been expanded to Brazil and Japan for paid users.
The New Max Plan
Accessing this enhanced Research capability for individual users typically requires the Claude Max subscription tier, launched April 9, 2025. Priced at $100/month for roughly 5 times the usage of the standard Pro plan (yielding approximately 225 messages per 5 hours) or $200/month for 20 times the usage (around 900 messages per 5 hours), Max also grants priority access during peak times. While offering substantially higher usage limits, the Max plan’s structure has drawn some early criticism from users, regarding potential session caps and perceived tightening of Pro limits preceding the Max launch.
Enterprise Tools and the Push for Transparency
For larger organizations, Anthropic offers an additional layer: Google Drive Cataloging for Claude Enterprise plans. “This technology utilizes secure retrieval augmented generation techniques to enable Claude to search across your document ecosystem, without requiring you to specify exact files,” explains Anthropic. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) involves fetching relevant snippets from indexed documents to help the AI formulate a more informed response. Initially, this feature indexes text-only from Google Docs, respects existing user permissions, encrypts data, and, according to Anthropic’s help documentation, may take several hours to re-index updated documents.
This focus on verifiable information aligns with Anthropic’s broader emphasis on AI safety and transparency, highlighted by its unveiling of tools for interpreting Claude’s internal reasoning and the launch of a Transparency Hub. The agentic nature of the Research feature also connects to the company’s work on protocols like the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for complex AI workflows. This approach differs from competitors like Google’s Gemini (integrated into Workspace since May 2024) or OpenAI’s ChatGPT features. Google maintains a notable connection, holding a 14% stake in Anthropic. Looking ahead, Anthropic states it plans to expand the range of content sources and research depth in the coming weeks, while ongoing development is suggested by recent tests of a voice mode for the Claude iOS app.
