Anthropic put Claude inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides on October 6, in public beta on every paid plan. The announcement covers two separate things, and most of the coverage treats them as one. They have different limits, different setup paths, and in a couple of places they do the opposite of each other.
The first is an add-on. You install it from the Google Workspace Marketplace, open a file, and go to Extensions > Claude. A sidebar opens beside the document, reads what's in it, sees what you've selected, and makes edits in place.
By default it asks before each change. You can switch that off for routine edits, and it will still stop for links, web images and anything that touches access.
The second is a set of connectors inside Claude itself, one each for Docs, Sheets and Slides. They exist because the Drive connector treats a Doc as a file: it can find it, read it, upload a new one and move it around, but it cannot change a paragraph or a cell inside it. The new connectors can.
Paste a link into a chat, or ask Claude to create a file, and it opens in a pane beside the conversation, where Claude's edits land in the file while you work in it too. The split is on the Claude side: an Owner can turn on Drive without turning on the editing connectors. On the Google side it is one app, approved once.
Where the sidebar stops
The sidebar works only on the file it's opened in. It cannot open, create or copy anything else in Drive, and it cannot export the file. If the task needs a second document, you open that document and start again.
It also cannot read, reply to or resolve comments in Docs, and it cannot accept or reject existing suggestions. Its own edits land as direct edits under your name, not as suggestions. The approval cards in the sidebar look like suggestions, but once you accept one the change is applied directly, which matters if your review process runs on Suggesting mode.
Chat history is stored in the browser, per file, and does not sync across devices. Google stops any single operation at six minutes, so large jobs run in stages. It supports Chrome, Edge and Safari; in Firefox the sidebar loads but nothing completes.
Where the connectors stop
The connectors invert several of those limits. They can create new files, and in Docs they can read and work with comments and suggestions, which the sidebar cannot. What they lack is the sidebar's precision: highlighting a paragraph or a cell range and pointing Claude at it is a sidebar feature.
The pane is a viewer, not the editing mechanism. Anthropic's doc puts it in one sentence: "The connector lets Claude change your file, and the pane needs its own Google session to show it." The edits go through the connector, under the same Google app your admin approved for Drive; the pane is Google's own editor rendered beside the chat so you can watch them land and work in the file at the same time.
That is why the pane has browser conditions and the edits do not. It works in Claude on the web in Chrome, where it borrows the Google login already in your browser, and in the desktop app when the built-in browser is turned on, where Claude asks you to sign in to Google inside the pane. Anywhere else you get an "Open in Google" button on the file card and watch the edits in your own browser instead.
Slides edits may not show up live in the pane, and Claude cannot add charts to Slides through it. Nothing in either release mentions the mobile apps.
This is the point where Google and Microsoft 365 part ways. Google exposes content-level APIs for Docs, Sheets and Slides that edit the live file server-side, merging like any other collaborator, so Claude can edit from the chat side at all. Microsoft Graph has nothing equivalent for Word or PowerPoint, which is why in-document editing in Microsoft 365 lives in the add-ins and the connector's writes stay at the file level.
One more gap predates this release and survives it. Run Cowork against a Drive folder synced by Drive for Desktop and native Docs, Sheets and Slides arrive as pointer files: Claude can see the file exists and read the link inside it, and none of what you wrote. For Google-native files the connector is the route, from the desktop app or anywhere else; the synced folder only helps with PDFs, Office files and the like.
What this looks like in a real workspace
On Team and Enterprise plans an Owner has to enable the three new connectors at the organization level before anyone sees them. The morning after the launch they were not in our own connector list; nothing appears for users until that switch is flipped.
The add-on has its own gate on the Google side. A Workspace super admin installs it from the Marketplace and scopes it to everyone or to specific groups, and if the organization blocks Marketplace apps, users see "This application is not allowed by your administrator" until it's allowlisted. The Google admin may also need to mark Claude as a trusted application before the connectors can authenticate.
So a full rollout touches two admin consoles and usually two different people. Plan for that rather than discovering it when the first user asks why Extensions > Claude isn't there.
Two settings deserve a deliberate choice. Leave "Ask before edits" on; the approval cards are how you find out what Claude thought the task was. And run a sharing review first, because Claude can only touch files your account can touch, which means every overshared folder is now also overshared to Claude.
For regulated firms, the beta has gaps: third-party inference through Bedrock, Vertex AI or Azure is not supported in the sidebar, zero data retention is not available, and Anthropic says not to use it with protected health information. Content is not used for training and is deleted within 30 days, with the usual exceptions in Anthropic's retention policy. If your Claude contract depends on one of those three, the sidebar is not ready for you yet.
Which one to use
The mistake I expect to see is a team installing the add-on, calling it "Claude in Google Drive," and then being surprised that it cannot see anything but the open file. The add-on is a per-file editing tool, and it is good at that. It is not a Drive integration.
Use the sidebar when the job lives in one file and you want to point at a selection: tighten this section, fix this formula, rebuild this slide in the deck's theme. Skills your organization has saved in Claude are available in the sidebar, along with the connectors your admins have enabled, so a monthly close you've written up as a skill runs inside the sheet.
Use the connectors when the job starts somewhere else: a brief that pulls from three documents, a Docs review that has to read the comments, or anything you're already doing in a chat or in Cowork. That is also the route from the desktop app; without the built-in browser you lose the pane, not the edits.
Neither one is "Claude in Google Workspace" by itself. Decide which jobs go through which door before you turn either one on, and the rollout is a configuration task. Skip that step and you have bought a sidebar that your team will describe as "Claude can't see my files."