That's the goal. They're desperately trying to make their platform 'sticky'. I see OpenAI using similar tactics with Spaces and Dots.

Dots in particular display some insidious methodology, they've hidden the "programmable" portions of an agent. They want to make it 'magic' (all your work goes through a single tool) but... that's pretty much exactly what businesses DON'T want. We need to see what it's doing, accessing, working with, underlying data, etc... It's an explicit business requirement for us.

The more they can 'hide' what the backend does, the harder it is to get away from the product.

Buuuuut, I don't think it's going to work. I can still export it somehow if I want to, and it would probably take 10-15 minutes... The whole point of these agents is that they're 'plug and play' with whatever technology you want.

And if they don't build them this way, someone will whip up an open source version that does it cheaper and more transparently in a couple of weeks.

Software being free now hits both of these companies exactly where they want protection.

> I read this as: We'll build anything and everything into Claude eventually.

Well, isn't that the natural end result of an AGI?

No more software, no more deciding what apps you need. It's all just Claude. Except now you're pulling 10kW to add up a column of numbers.

I mean, I don't think it's that different from the current reality of businesses just picking Microsoft or Google as their one-stop-shop for business software. There will actually be more competition now, as Anthropic and OpenAI will be added to the mix.

The playbook Anthropic is following with integrating everything innto their platform is the same playbook that enabled Microsoft, Google, Baidu, Amazon, Apple, etc al to get and stay where they are.

>How does this work long-term? Is the new reality going to be picking an AI provider for all of your SaSS tooling,

I suspect the goal is partly starting a walled garden.

"Llms are interchangeable? Our harness/toolset isn't".

It's a way to get a moat I guess.

It doesn't sound like a business for the scale they're aiming for though. Taking a bite of the MS office's pie doesn't seem to me like a trillion dollar company move.

Claude becomes a no-code platform with all the same shortcomings they have.

The rest of the world moves on using LLMs as tools.

Anthropic is eventually bought and stripped for parts.

Competition will thrive as it always does, wouldn’t worry about that. In this case I view Claude as more of the competitor here. Ever try using Co-pilot in Microsoft Office?

“Please remove this page break I can’t figure out how to get rid of and someone else added”

Co-pilot: “Sorry I’m unable to do that but you can follows these same instructions you can find on the Internet to accomplish that”.

Claude: “I will literally rebuild Word from the ground up to solve this problem if that’s what it takes (but here is how to actually solve your problem), oh and do you want this exported in the best format for this software, this other software, or in these 15 file formats? Oh I don’t have native capabilities for that format - ok let’s build a script and convert….”

You get the picture. Competition is here, and it will get even better. Many SaaS companies will die. Good. Many of them only delivered short-term value solving artificial constrains or gaps in software.