Agents, add-ins, and a friendlier Claude: a week of surfaces

Claude spreads into documents, decks, and desks

Anthropic's biggest structural change this week was turning Claude from a chat window into a workspace. Projects became a single multi-threaded conversation where each request spawns a thread Claude works on in the cloud and reports back on — what's ready for review, what's waiting on you — rather than a folder of separate chats. In the same vein, Claude chat and Claude Cowork merged into one experience, so asking a quick question and handing off a larger task happen in the same thread, with existing chats, tasks, skills, and memories left in place. And Claude Slides, Claude Design, and Claude Docs entered beta, producing a deck, social images, and a one-pager from a single launch brief, with inline comments routed back to Claude for edits.

For regulated work, the Life Sciences Verification Program grants verified teams access to Mythos, Opus, and Sonnet with classifiers tuned to be more permissive for drug discovery and clinical development, shifting from real-time blocking to offline monitoring with 30-day retention. Enterprise teams also got transcripts of Claude in Chrome sessions through the Compliance API, and sellers got a Salesforce plugin with 37 pre-built sales skills.

Claude Code's week: caches, transcripts, and auto mode

Claude Code shipped a run of updates, and most of them were about sessions that used to go wrong quietly. Restored memory files no longer break prompt caching — the age note on a restored file used to shift between requests after compaction or resume — and the same update stopped plugins and marketplace listings from leaking passwords or tokens stored in git, ssh, or marketplace URLs. Sessions stuck retrying "unexpected tool_use_id" 400 errors now self-heal corrupted transcripts or end with a clear error and a /rewind hint, and the first non-interactive turn's wait for connecting MCP servers is now bounded.

The tooling around agent runs got attention too: projects without a CLAUDE.md now fall back to AGENTS.md, claude -p and Agent SDK sessions no longer hang silently after an internal error, and auto mode now defaults to the server-side classifier on the API, Bedrock, Vertex, Foundry, and gateways, so classifier overhead isn't billed. Remote sessions gained fast mode and per-command allowed domains so each Bash or Monitor command reaches only the hosts it needs, gateways got opt-in hint headers, and a quick patch fixed 400 errors for proxy and gateway users.

OpenAI's SDKs converge on the same API surface

OpenAI's SDKs moved in lockstep this week, and the headline is that managed WebSocket sessions for the Responses API — plus prompt-cache prewarming and compaction progress events — landed in the Python SDK, the Node SDK, and the Go SDK together. Webhook endpoint management followed in all three: Python, Node, Go. A later wave added vault credentials and safety webhooks in Go and the same vault and storage management in Node. Python's releases also carried real fixes — stream error normalization and bounded vector store polling, retry-limit validation and preserved application errors, and a memory leak in parse_response — while Node tidied WebSocket iterators and streaming turns with per-iterator event limits and compaction progress events.

ChatGPT goes where the work already is

ChatGPT arrived inside a Microsoft Word add-in on all plans, Free included, joining Excel and PowerPoint through the same sidebar for drafting, summarizing, and reformatting. Plugins can now connect multiple accounts at once, so personal and work Gmail or Calendar live in one conversation, and a Privacy Center gathers chat privacy, memory, and data-use controls in one place for signed-in users. Elsewhere: Experian credit score tracking in Finances for U.S. Plus and Pro users, Sponsored Agents and ad integrations with HubSpot and Shopify, and org- and project-level API key creation governance that lets admins restrict new keys to service accounts.

Codex, meanwhile, added experimental voice conversations and Touch ID for MCP requests in the CLI, closed a Windows-process escape from restricted WSL sandboxes, and turned reasoning summaries off by default to stop providers that don't support them from rejecting requests. Its iOS app gained folders in the file picker and writing blocks.