Anthropic’s Claude is a key rival to ChatGPT and Gemini, even though it’s been trailing these chatbots when it comes to headline-grabbing new features. But Anthropic is slowly getting to a point where it can claim feature parity with rivals, especially after this week’s big Claude update.
Claude now has a Research mode, which is Anthropic’s version of ChatGPT (and Gemini) Deep Research. Interestingly, Anthropic gave Research a big twist, claiming its AI can come up with deep research results much faster than alternatives.
Also important is Claude’s support for Google Workspace, which allows the AI to securely look at the contents of your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs apps to assist with work-related questions.
Faster than ChatGPT?
Anthropic explained in a blog post that Research allows Claude to “search across both your internal work context and the web to help you make decisions and take action faster than before.”
That sounds a lot like ChatGPT Deep Research, a feature I’ve come to use all the time for more complex questions. Deep Research give me good results after ChatGPT searches for information and reasons through my prompt. The results can take several minutes to be generated, and the detailed report then offers links to sources.
Claude will seemingly do the same thing with Research, but Anthropic says the AI will be faster by employing an agentic behavior, where the AI conducts several searches at the same time:
Claude operates agentically, conducting multiple searches that build on each other while determining exactly what to investigate next. It explores different angles of your question automatically and works through open questions systematically. This approach delivers thorough answers, complete with easy-to-check citations, so you can trust Claude’s findings.
Anthropic says that Research will deliver “high-quality, comprehensive answers in minutes, and that “the balance of speed of quality that sets it apart” from competitors.
While the company refrains from comparing Claude Research to ChatGPT Deep Research in its blog post, Anthropic told VentureBeat that Research is much faster than competing AI tools.
“Research is a tool to help enterprise workers get well-researched answers to queries in less than a minute. Other solutions on the market take up to 30 minutes to generate responses — that’s not what your average Sales exec or financial services employee needs,” a spokesperson told the blog.
I’ve never had a problem waiting for ChatGPT to finish its Deep Research reports, but then again, I don’t use it for things that require instant results. I can wait.
As for Claude Research, I won’t be able to use it anytime soon. The feature is available in early beta for Max, Team, and Enterprise plans in three markets: the United States, Japan, and Brazil. There’s no telling when it’ll be available in Europe, where I live. Anthropic told The Verge that Research will be available on the Claude Pro tier ($20/month) in the future.
Claude makes Google Workspace integration exciting
What’s also interesting about Claude Research is that it can work with your Google Workspace data. That’s a really important integration for Enterprise users who rely on Google’s various apps for work purposes and need AI to sift through all that.
Anthropic says in the blog post that “Claude can securely search emails, review documents, and see your calendar commitments” after you connect it to your Google Workspace account. Google Workspace support is available in ChatGPT, though it’s not as complex as Anthropics. Also, if you use Gemini as your main AI chatbot, you’ll be able to call upon it in many Google apps.
Anthropic emphasizes speed again when detailing the Google Workspace integration:
Ask Claude to pull together meeting notes from last week, identify action items from follow-up email threads, and search relevant documents for additional context. Claude brings these insights directly to you, eliminating hours of manual work and letting you focus on strategic planning instead of information gathering.
Interestingly, Claude will also provide citations from Google Workspace apps to prevent hallucinations. That’s a great feature to have built into such complex functionalities.
Claude Enterprise administrators will also be able to enable a cataloging feature for Google Workspace. This feature uses a “specialized index of your organization’s documents to find the information you need—even when it’s buried in lengthy documents or scattered across multiple files.”
“This technology utilizes secure retrieval augmented generation techniques to enable Claude to search across your document ecosystem, without requiring you to specify exact files,” Anthropic writes. “With enterprise-grade security that keeps your data within your control, Claude maintains the confidentiality of your organization’s knowledge while delivering precise answers.”
Now, that’s an exciting feature. The ability to ask the AI a complex question about data scattered in your Google apps might be a killer feature for future AI assistants.
Obviously, the privacy question will immediately come up. Anthropic’s blog doesn’t offer enough information about security and privacy, though it does suggest everything is secure.
However, a spokesperson told VentureBeat how Anthropic handles privacy for the new cataloging feature. They also explained Anthropic doesn’t train on the Google Workspace data, which should be a given:
Privacy is foundational to our approach. We don’t train our models on user data by default. We’ve implemented strict authentication and access control mechanisms. Each user or organization’s connections to external services are properly authenticated and authorized for only that specific user or organization.
The Google Workspace cataloging feature will be restricted to Claude Enterprise users, but the Google Workspace integration will be available in beta to all paid users. Claude Team and Enterprise users will have to enable Google Workspace access domain-wide before independent users can bring the AI into their Google apps.
Unfortunately, this feature isn’t coming to regular Google accounts. You can’t connect your Claude AI to retrieve data from Gmail, Calendar, and Google Drive unless you have a Google Workspace account.
