AI + ML
The Claude in Slack app is dead, long live Claude in Slack
Anthropic is killing off its existing Claude in Slack app in favor of an always-on agentic alternative dubbed Claude Tag that will listen and learn from everything it’s given access to.Claude Tag can now join organizational Slack instances “as a team member,” according to Anthropic’s announcement, where it will have access to whatever channels domain administrators decide upon, as well as the tools, data, and codebases they contain. Anyone in a channel with Claude Tag can tag @Claude to delegate tasks to the bot, which will be able to perform a variety of actions and build context about its environment based on what flows through a channel. “We see Claude Tag as the beginning of an evolution of Claude Code,” Anthropic said. “It makes the model even more proactive, and it works better with a full team.”
Anthropic further explained that it’s using Tag to write code (64 percent of what comes from the product team is apparently written by Tag) as well as “chase down product metrics and data, work through support tickets … [and] help find the root cause of tricky bugs.”
Integrating Claude into Slack isn’t exactly new – there’s already an existing Slack connector app for Claude, but it’s being depreciated in favor of Tag. According to the Claude in Slack help page, the existing connector will leave service on August 3, and Enterprise and Teams customers are getting access to Tag beginning today, per Anthropic’s announcement. The persistence and contextual learning that Tag brings are its major changes over the prior Claude-Slack connector, according to Anthropic. Tag is shared across a channel, meaning that everyone who interacts with it in a particular space will interact with the same Claude as their coworkers, “more like interacting collaboratively with a teammate” instead of just getting one-off advice from a bot, according to Anthropic. As mentioned above, Claude Tag will also learn the longer it’s in a channel, meaning users won’t have to explain things to it every time they chat with it. A Claude Tag based in one channel can also learn from other channels and data sources, provided that it’s given permission to do so.
