Claude moves into Google Docs, Sheets and Slides
Anthropic's Claude now opens in a sidebar inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, with a public beta on every paid plan and connectors that let the assistant create Google files from its own chat.
Anthropic has opened a public beta of Claude for Google Workspace, an add-on that drops the assistant into a sidebar beside your open Google Docs, Sheets and Slides files. It is available on every paid Claude plan, and the company has also shipped beta connectors that let Claude create and edit Google files from its own chat window.
Claude inside your files
With the add-on installed, Claude can read the document, spreadsheet or deck you have open, see which text, cells or slides you have selected, and change them in place. In Docs it will rewrite a sentence or restyle a heading without disturbing the surrounding formatting, and for bigger rewrites it proposes suggestion cards that you apply or dismiss. In Sheets it writes formulas, builds pivot tables and native charts and adds tabs, or pulls a range into Python to clean and join data before writing the result back into the sheet. In Slides it builds new slides from the deck's own layouts and themes, then flags elements that overlap, run off the slide or are hard to read.
Approval modes, connectors and enterprise controls
Claude opens in "Ask before edits" mode by default, where each change arrives as an approval card and waits for your sign-off; "Accept all edits" mode lets it work through a task unattended. The sidebar carries the models, connectors and skills attached to your Claude account, so a request for a quarterly business review deck can pull account history from Salesforce and recent call notes through a Google Drive connector. On Enterprise plans the Compliance API, customer-managed encryption keys and OpenTelemetry audit export apply to the add-on as well.
Separately, new Google Docs, Sheets and Slides connectors work in the other direction. You can start in Claude and have it create or edit a Google file from the chat, opening a document, spreadsheet or deck in a pane beside the conversation. Access follows your existing Google sharing permissions.
How to get it
Claude for Google Workspace is in beta on all paid plans. Install it from the Google Workspace Marketplace, then open a file and go to Extensions, Claude, Open Claude. Admins can deploy it to a whole domain or selected groups from the Google Admin console, which is also the route when an organisation blocks Marketplace installs by default. The connectors need an owner or primary owner to switch them on first for Team and Enterprise plans.
Our opinion
Gemini already lives inside Google's own files, so the headline here is not that an assistant can sit beside a document. It is that Anthropic's assistant now behaves like a careful editor rather than an autocomplete: reading the open file, holding every change for approval, and showing the passage it wants to alter before it touches formatting. That is the right default, because the real risk with an AI editing a spreadsheet is not a wrong formula, it is a change nobody saw happen. The connectors are the more consequential half of the release. Once Claude can create the Google Doc and keep creating them, the document suite stops being the place you go to work and becomes plumbing beneath a chat window, and the file manager becomes a detail you only notice when permissions break.