5 Ways Claude Tag Could Change How You Use AI

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Well, here we are, heading towards the back half of this week, with a return of Fable V no closer insight. In fact, the rumor mill suggests. that we are not in line for pretty much any models for some time. Later this week, I'm going to do a show about what you can do to make the most of this forced AI model pause. But for now, let's look at some of the conversations that are actually shaping the Discord.

Now, first up, I've flagged this before, but I want to take this chance to flag it again. Right now, emotions are running at an 11 when it comes to this anthropic news. I saw a post call viral on X.

about the significance of this bipartisan letter asking Howard Lutnick if Anthropic had been singled out. But friends, this is at this point about a week old, and these sort of open congressional letters don't actually do anything. They don't usually get responses. This is, in a word, a nothing burger.

One thing that also probably amounts to nothing, but is at least a little bit more interesting, is that one anthropic customer is taking it upon themselves to get the model reinstated by suing the government. In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, a legal tech firm called Legion claimed the ban was illegal and damaging their business.

The harm to Legion is immediate, irreparable, and existential, the lawsuit stated. The pace of Frontier AI advancement is blistering and competitive ground lost during a suspension cannot be regained after the fact.

Certainly, regardless of the ultimate success of this lawsuit, I think that is a sentiment that many of you listening now will agree with. The filing claimed that export control laws do not cover shutting down access to cloud software, a point that many other legal commentators made as soon as the ban was announced. Serving computer code or text outputs from a computer isn't typically seen as an export that can be proper subject of export control.

In the alternative, if the ban relied on IEEA powers similar to sanctions, the lawsuit notes that these powers do not apply to information and no prerequisite national security emergency was declared. Further, the lawsuit argues the move was overbroad and possibly retaliatory towards anthropics. It also notes the decision to block distribution of a model directly contradicts the executive order signed at the beginning of June, which ruled out the idea of a model licensing scheme.

In making their argument, Legion centers the facts on their Canadian development team losing access to the model, pointing out that targeting Allied nations with export controls is highly unusual.

Anthropic for their part remained silent on the matter, and there is certainly no indication this lawsuit is being filed on their behalf by a third party. In comments to the press, they referred to previous statements indicating they're grateful to the administration for working quickly to resolve the issue.

Now, in terms of the potential success of this, at this point, most legal analysts that I've seen seem to think that the administration has gone outside the bounds of the law on this one, but also that it's unlikely to be a clear-cut decision for a judge.

And frankly, none of that is going to actually matter because as long as Anthropic is taking it seriously, which they clearly are, presumably, and oh my gosh, hopefully, it'll be resolved through negotiation before any legal process could actually make it through the court. Now the administration's friskiness when it comes to controlling the flow of AI is doing nothing but increasing. The most recent news is that the administration is now pressuring Meta to agree to voluntary model review.

Sources told the New York Times that the White House is pressing Meta to submit their AI models for safety and performance testing prior to release. Meta is currently the lone holdout among major AI labs after Microsoft, XAI, and Google signed agreements shortly before the recent executive order on AI and cybersecurity.

Now, reportedly the administration's requests seem to only relate to testing at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation at the Commerce Department, not whatever additional security testing has been going on at the NSA. And Meta does seem to be leaning towards an agreement with a spokesperson commenting We share the administration's goal of advancing U.S. leadership on robust and secure frontier AI. While we are working through the details, we hope to sign the agreement soon.

Still, the whole idea of pressuring a company to submit their technology for government testing really highlights just how air quotes voluntary the program actually is. And, having contained advanced AI models, the Commerce Department is reportedly turning to robots as their next technology to ban. Politico reports that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick held a closed door meeting on Monday to discuss the risk of Chinese-made models. According to notes provided to Politico, Lutnick said

We don't want state subsidized robotics attacking us in America. This is the arms race that is coming. Robotic arms are coming. We need to make sure they're produced in America, so we're going to study those right now. Commerce Department officials reportedly view state backed Chinese robot companies as a massive threat, fearing they could proliferate through global markets before US alternatives hit scale.

Chinese robots are already subject to steep tariffs, but the Commerce Department is considering additional action. The Monday meeting included more than a dozen executives from major firms including Boston Dynamics, SpaceX, Siemens, and Goldman Sachs.

The major topic of the meeting was how the US can best rebuild its industrial base, but apparently the risks of Chinese robots dominated the discussion. One source said, The whole idea that what we're going to end up with is an American brain with a Chinese body is a very, very bad strategic plan. Now it's unclear from the reporting how fast we should expect a crackdown, but the sabres are already rattling elsewhere in Washington.

On Monday, the ex account for the Congressional Select Committee on China posted a screenshot of a unitary humanoid robot for sale through Amazon. It's priced at$17,990 and can ship to Washington in a month. The Select Committee added Unitree was recently designated as a Chinese military company and its products are a threat to our national security, yet here is Amazon selling a United robot in America. We need Chairman Mulnar's Guard Act to stop this threat and support American robotics.

Now, several Chinese robotics firms have received the same designation, which many see as a precursor to a Huawei style ban.

Now, on the topic of American-made robots, Elon Musk recently said that they are in the final stages of completion of Optimus 3, which he says is really going to be by far the most advanced robot in the world, nothing's even close, but people are, I would say, fairly skeptical of those claims.

Speaking of Elon, though, XAI has followed suit to OpenAI and Anthropic, introducing the goals primitive in an update to their coding harness Grok build. As with the goal command in codec, This allows users to define an outcome and set Grok to work on a long horizon task.

Grock will continue working across multiple steps, deploying sub agents to complete individual tasks, and orchestrating the entire process without user intervention. The orchestration process includes planning, implementation, and verification to ensure a high quality output.

So a couple things that make this worthy of inclusion here. First of all, it reinforces the idea that Slash goal is an actual new AI UX primitive, not just a generic feature. But second, this is our first glimpse of what the XAI Cursor Partnership will look like after the acquisition was finalized last week.

The goal command natively uses a fine-tune of Grok called Grok Build 0.1 as well as Cursors Composer 2.5 to complete its tasks. And the combination has at least the potential to be more than the sum of its parts. Composer is known for cost-effective high performance, making it a natural fit for coding subagents, and while the latest version of the flagship Grok model didn't grab that much attention on release.

One big point of differentiation it tried to make was a sophisticated orchestration process built into the model. When used as a chatbot, this mostly just resulted in subagents arguing over how to interpret information, but that same process applied to coding tasks.

could make Grok really good at that sort of orchestration. We'll see what comes next and whether this makes any waves, but certainly the update to build reinforces the idea that XAI at this point, as much as SpaceX is becoming a NeoCloud, isn't quite done releasing AI products just yet. Speaking of AI products, one that is getting a lot of attention is BiteDance's C Dance 2.5.

We've started to get a ton of previews of the new model, which doubles maximum clip length from 15 to 30 seconds and adds 4K resolution. The new version also supports up to 50 input references to use as objects or characters within scenes. By comparison, SeedDance 2.0 could handle 12 references, and Google's Vio 3.1, released back in January, maxed out at 3. Seedance 2.5 is also able to make use of image, video, and audio files as references, the first time anyone has moved beyond images.

Now, so far it doesn't look like anyone has actually got their hands on the model, so we're just going off of a demo clip provided by ByteDance. Yet that's enough for people to suggest that this will be the mythos moment of video model. Simon Smith, who I'm fairly sure isn't getting paid by Byte Dance, by the way, that's a joke. If you've heard Simon Smith quoted here, he was very, very much not getting paid by Byte Dance, wondered how they managed to gain such a big lead in video. He asked

Seed dance seemed to be pulling away in the video generation race. Is there a recursive feedback loop at work here? If so, what is it? Are they generating training data with each generation to train the next? If so, what do they do to increase quality with each iteration? Whatever it is, the corpus of training content they have access to through TikTok seems to be paying off.

Lastly today, I don't want to get into it deeply, but one story that I am keeping an eye on is some of the market moves that I had previously discussed with regard to Google specifically moving to a broader AI sell-off. To the extent that this becomes a more significant narrative trend, as opposed to just a particular market moment, we'll come back and explore it more. For now though, that's gonna do it for today's headlines. Next up, the main episode.

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how we think about interacting with AI at work. Now the feature we're discussing is called Claude Tag, which Claude announced on Tuesday as a new way for teams to work with Claude. And to put it really simply, it's basically Claude in Slack. but not just as a different channel to prompt Claude, but instead as a full team member that has access to all of the context from all the different channels, as well as the different tools that your team is already using. Anthropic rights.

Claude Tag is an evolution of Claude Code made more proactive and built to work with a full team. It's now one of the main ways we get things done at Anthropic. 65% of our product team's code now comes from our internal version. Tag Claude with a request and it breaks the task into stages, works through them with the tools it has access to, and responds in the thread with what it creates. It'll write or merge pull requests.

run data analysis, or help resolve an incident. In a channel, that's a channel on Slack, there's one claude that interacts with everyone so a teammate can pick up exactly where you left off. It builds more context about the work as it follows the channel, so you don't need to explain things from scratch. Turn ambient behavior on and Claude takes initiative. It follows up on threads that have gone quiet and flags what's relevant from across its channels and tools.

So for someone who's moving fast, you could be forgiven for thinking it's just another agent in Slack sort of announcement, of which we've had a fair few. But just based on the way that the anthropic team was talking about it, there's clearly something going on here. Anthropic team member Alexander Bricken writes

Claude Tag has completely changed the way we do work at Anthropic. Having the multiplayer experience of Claude within Slack with all of the fundamental primitives of Claude Code, like proactivity, subagents, and long horizon task management, is an entirely new way to do work asynchronously.

Tobin South writes, Claude Tag is how I do 90% plus of my work. I even had people from Anthropic texting me specifically when I didn't cover it on yesterday's show, basically arguing behind the scenes that this is a big deal. Now, I had already begun planning this episode when those texts started coming in, but still that should tell you how the team behind it views its significance.

Now, this is not the only feature of this type that's available. Now, Anthropic is not the first company to release something like this. The semi analysis team wrote, Perplexity's Computer Slack coworker has been wildly useful internally at Semi-Analysis, which is why Anthropic launched a computing product. The team is configuring Claude Tag AI coworkers and is excited to compare and contrast them with Perplexity Computer. Click Health Simon Smith wrote,

Immediately asked our CTO to activate Claude Tag. We already use ChatGPT Workspace Agents in Slack. They're great for a bunch of use cases like providing support based on prior resolve Slack posts. and summarizing Slack activity to create a weekly brief. The difference with Claude Tag is that this level of configuration isn't even necessary.

You just drop Claude into a Slack channel and it picks up the context and becomes useful. We currently create one Slack channel per project. We've historically also created ChatGPT projects and notebook LM notebooks along with those Slack channels to work with AI, duplicating or triplicating context across all those surfaces.

Now, we can just create the Slack channel as we've always done and drop Claude in. I also think this will massively help with AI diffusion. People don't have to install Claude Desktop to access Claude's most powerful capabilities and co-work and code. They can just interact with Claude as if it's another person in Slack. No less than Andre Carpathy argued that this is indeed a bigger deal than it seems at first. He wrote,

This is a new paradigm for interacting with Claude that is significantly more in line with all the other human activity org-wide. Once you do all of the under-the-hood engineering work to make this just work, e.g. across tools, integrations, compute environments, memory security, etcetera.

Claude basically joins the team in a seamless way. You can talk to it as you would talk to a person, and it can help with a very large variety of workloads. In my opinion, this is the third major redesign of LLM UIUX. The first paradigm was that the LLM is a website you go to. The second was that it is an app you download on your computer. The third one is that it is a self-contained, persistent, asynchronous entity with org-wide tools and context working alongside teams of humans.

It really takes a while to wrap your head around it, but it works, and it is awesome. Now for a lot of folks, the big eye-blinking statistic was that Anthropic is saying that 65% of their product team's code now comes from Claude Tag. EJazz wrote, It's blowing my mind that 65% of product code in Anthropic is now written by tagging Claude in group chats of staff discussing what they want to build.

RIP, the days of tediously writing long product talks, now you can literally go from Slack to a production ready feature. Cloud Code is barely a year old, by the way. Developer Nick Dobos wrote, Anthropic isn't using Claude Code anymore. Major agent UX shift alert. And I think this is one of the sneaky things that's going to take people a little while to fully wrap their heads around. While you might be tagging at Claude, what you're really calling upon is Claude Code.

Now, certainly, both Anthropic and OpenAI have already spent lots of cycles trying to make the coding capabilities of their tools more accessible for non-coders. But this is the biggest move in that direction yet. When Claud already exists in the workspace that you're operating in, the barrier to using it to build something is having an idea and dropping it into the Slack where you're already working.

Now, while it's early days for non-anthropic users, many were quick to share what they had learned from using Claude Tag over the past few weeks or months. Claude Co-Team member Tariq pointed out that each Claude in each channel is different.

One suggestion he had was to introduce air quotes Claude to a new channel with a pin message and a set of instructions to remember, like which persona to take, when to respond, etc. He says you can think of it like it's Claude.md because all of this will get added to its memory.

Tariq also suggests having a personal channel, e.g. Tariq-Claude, where you can tag Claude for your own work and give it instructions specific to you. You can then forward other messages to that channel so your Claude can get to work the way you like.

He also noted that this helps with overwhelm, because when things get going, it can be hard to keep track of all the threads. He wrote, in my personal channel, I like to ask Claude to keep a pinned message that it updates with the status of everything.

He even uses a set of emojis to be able to help him understand where different work streams are in a single glance. Chris Taylor from Fractional, who joined the broader anthropic ecosystem to run their version of a forward deployed engineering group, described how they had been using it across their company.

He said it kind of works like a coworker that just picks things up. It owns busywork, daily status summaries, following up when people are out of office, nudging teammates on open to-dos, pushing back due dates as plans shift.

Chris said that when one of its own scheduled tasks started misfiring, it caught the bug, fixed it, and wrote it up without being asked. He also said that it manages itself. We needed somewhere to track bugs and ideas for Claude Tag while we were testing it, so it built that tracker for us and files every new issue and use case on its own.

Finally, reinforcing that this is in fact a fully fledged version of Claude Code, not just Claude, he says it writes and ships. Handed one of our code bases, Claude read through it, wrote up the 10 most important problems to fix, stack ranked, then made the changes and opened them for review, all in Slack. The Claude Dev team shared that they're using it for incident response, bug triage, dependent work, i.e. work that's blocked on something else, background watching, and monitoring metrics.

Nityesh from the Every Team wrote about why this will feel familiar to many. He said, Claude Tag has completely changed the way I do work for the last four months. Except it's not Claude Tag. Anthropic only announced that a few hours ago, and I don't even have access to it. But I did build a version of it for myself, which I've been using for months now.

Basically, he said that after OpenClaw came online, he built a harness that allowed him to turn any Mac into an AI employee with the Claude Code Headless Mode. He then ended up building three such employees and had them working in Slack for the last few months. Now this idea of agents inside Slack is also something that we've experimented a lot with over here as well.

One of the reasons that I burned through a billion tokens in March is that I was experimenting with a series of AI enablement agents that lived in Slack and could do things like figuring out how we were using AI, providing coaching on how to better use AI, and developing overall AI strategy. Now you also might remember me talking about a month ago about how the team at Every had shifted their agent strategy from originally having every employee build an AI agent version of themselves.

to instead having a group of agents that worked across employees based on function and goal and had shared context. Claude Tag in many ways seems to be institutionalizing some of those shifts as best practice.

So trying to sum this all up, let's talk about the five big shifts that I think Claude Tag could represent. And keep in mind, this is not just about Claude Tag as a feature, but about it as a leading indicator of how labs and agent app companies are thinking about the future of AI at work. The first big shift is from an app native interface to existing workplace interfaces. Obviously, this breaks agents out of the controlled settings of the web app or the desktop apps that the labs have built.

and instead uses the existing spaces that people do work in. Now to some extent one has to think that this was inevitable. As you try to shift behavior and get everyone working in a new way, one of the biggest points of friction is the new interfaces that they have to go interact with.

The fact that the full power of Claude Code and everything that it can build is now accessible from the most default channel where people are working seems likely to me to make a big difference in terms of who accesses that power. Likewise, this moves AI from a private chatbot to a shared teammate experience.

Now, of course, there have been no shortage of sharing-based features to break your personal chats out of their home. In fact, both OpenAI and Anthropic have released versions of better native websites slash web app builders in order to help make sharing more easily. This of course takes that to the next level, which also leads to our third shift, which is from single-user context, i.e. what the AI or agent knows about you, to the full team context.

Part of the power of moving the agent from its native home to your team's native home is that it gets access to the ambient context that exists all around it without you having to create an entirely different way of accessing all that context. Now, already, Claude Tag also reinforces a shift which was already very much happening, which is the shift from prompting to delegation as the main mode of interacting with AI.

Already throughout the year, as agent to capacity has come online, people have been slowly but surely breaking out of the way that they used to interact with these tools. A big part of that has been in shifting from telling the AI what to do to telling it what you are trying to accomplish and giving it more freedom and latitude to accomplish an ever-expanding scale of goals.

Lastly, Claude Tag and more broadly agents that work in your team's workspaces shift AI's importance from something that becomes personally essential to key workers to an actual organizational dependency, a new way of working not just individually but across the entire team.

Which is not to say that there aren't challenges. First of all, while yes, this is theoretically just dropping Claude into Slack, there are a lot of questions around access and tool configuration that make its setup potentially much more complicated than it at first seemed.

Anthropic released an entire blog post about best practices for setting up agent identity in this new claw tag paradigm. They also pointed out some best practices around permissions, which wouldn't necessarily be obvious at first glance.

Gail Wiener points out that while the positive side is the democratization of Claude Code capabilities to a broader subset of the organization, the flip side of that is that something like Claude Tag potentially runs into existing trust barriers and skepticism that could create a challenge. She describes a scenario where there are five people on a team with her as the AI power user, two members of the team not trusting AI, one team member thinking that the power user uses AI too much.

and another being indifferent. Gail writes, I start tagging Claude in the project chat, and here's what happens in that room. The moment Claude is in the channel, every message anyone types is being read by it. It stops looking like a tool the team uses and starts looking like my tool that's now sitting in everyone's workspace.

I become the person who brought the surveillance device to the meeting, even if that's not what it is. The skeptic's position gets validated every time Claude produces something good. C, she's outsourcing her thinking, and every time it produces something mediocre. C, this is what we were worried about. You can't win that frame.

Basically, she's arguing that this creates a whole new challenge around the human layer that will have to be solved as well. One specific thing that seems fairly challenging to me is that despite the fact that you just use at claude for every instance of where you want to call upon these capabilities. Different claws and different channels have potentially access to different tools and different permissions and different contexts, and that feels like it'll get confusing super, super fast.

In fact, in Simon Smith's first impressions post later on, he did write, Claude being many clods is a bit disorienting. I've come to think of Claude as my Claude, the one in the app that knows me and connects to things I've connected it to, but there is no single Claude in Slack.

It's channel dependent and admin configured, and none of the clods are mine. This seems to be a common feeling. One of the first things I'm seeing is people tagging Claude in channels to ask what it can do, what it remembers, how it maintains context in the channel. Indeed, how this creates new challenges and opportunities for context is a big topic of conversation.

And for some, in light of the Fable Challenge, in light of everything that's happened with Fable, there's also increasingly good reasons to not want to outsource this sort of process to a single closed provider. Hugging Face's head of product, Victor writes,

At Hugging Face, we've been building our own agent that we use via Slack. Honestly, building your own is quite simple and you'll be happy you did. Any model you want, including self-hosted if needed, fully customizable to your stack, and of course no lock-in and no wait list and not overpriced.

Look, ultimately, it is very easy to overestimate the significance of any one new feature. And yet, if for no other reason than the significant shifts that the anthropic team themselves are reporting, it seems like Claude Tag is one paradigm shift. That will at least be worth exploring. I'll report back as we try it out and see what we learn. For now, though, that's gonna do it for today's AI Daily Brief. I appreciate you listening or watching, as always.