Anthropic expands Claude Excel integration to all Pro subscribers

Anthropic’s Excel integration may sound mundane next to splashy model releases, but this is where AI actually becomes infrastructure. Giving every Claude Pro user a native way to ingest, analyze and manipulate spreadsheets inside Excel collapses a huge amount of friction in day‑to‑day data work. The new safeguards around not overwriting existing cells and better handling of longer sessions reflect lessons from real‑world usage rather than lab demos.

For the AGI race, the strategic point is that frontier labs are racing just as hard on distribution and workflow embedding as they are on tokens per second. Owning the interface where analysts, finance teams and operations staff already live—Excel—turns general‑purpose models into line‑of‑business tools and makes switching to a rival assistant more painful. It also nudges more organisations toward agent‑style usage, where models act directly on business data and documents rather than just answering questions, which is a necessary stepping stone toward more autonomous systems.