Anthropic partners with Microsoft: Claude can now read your Outlook emails and Word files
Anthropic has just announced a major integration between its assistant Claude and Microsoft 365 suite, marking an important step in its strategy for expanding into professional use.
With this update, Claude will now be able to analyze and extract information directly from Word, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive, without any manual file transfers required.
Claude joins the Microsoft 365 suite
Users on the Team and Enterprise plans can now enable this integration—provided that administrators authorize it beforehand.
Once activated, Claude can access Word documents stored on OneDrive or SharePoint, browse Teams conversations, and even analyze email threads in Outlook to provide relevant context during interactions with the chatbot.
“This integration allows Claude to become a true work assistant, capable of leveraging a company’s collective memory,” explained Anthropic.
In practical terms, the AI can now search for reports, summarize meetings, synthesize internal communications, or identify experts to contact on specific topics.
New “Enterprise Search” Feature
Anthropic is also launching Enterprise Search, a feature designed to enable Claude to search across all of a company’s data sources.
This tool aims to be particularly useful for:
- Onboarding new employees,
- Analyzing customer feedback,
- Or finding strategic information scattered across various HR, CRM, or communication tools.
An integration based on the MCP protocol
Technically, the link between Claude and Microsoft 365 is based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source standard developed by Anthropic to connect AI applications with other services.
Microsoft, for its part, has promised to widely adopt MCP in Windows as part of its transformation towards “AI PCs” — computers capable of engaging in natural dialogue with users.
A strategic partnership between Anthropic and Microsoft
This collaboration is part of a growing alignment between the two companies. Microsoft is already leveraging the Claude models to enhance several of its products, including Copilot Researcher, GitHub Copilot, Copilot Studio, and the new Office Agent, which can automatically generate Word and PowerPoint documents from a chat interface.
As Microsoft seeks to diversify its AI partnerships and reduce reliance solely on OpenAI, this partnership with Anthropic strengthens its Copilot ecosystem while paving the way for new interoperable integrations.
