This announcement is all about Claude extending its reach beyond single-player workflows and into multi-player workflows.

On the flip side, Slack just announced MCP support for the Slackbot AI chat capability embedded within Slack. It is, for now, exclusively single-player.

Single-player is the "safe place" (relatively speaking). The context, permissions, and standards (MCP/MCP UI apps) all work reasonably well for it, but get super complex or break down entirely when thrown into a multi-player shared context. I suspect Slack is doing what they are doing with an eye towards multi-player, but it's hard to say how that will manifest.

For a real life example of this challenge: I work in scheduling (for Reclaim.ai) and you can ask our chat to find time to meet with a coworker and we go find time and help explain why certain times won't work. For example, it might say: "I couldn't do 11am tomorrow because you've got a job interview scheduled on your personal calendar". This is safe and fine to do in a private context.

But... imagine if one were to ask our service (or Claude) to find time with someone and it replied to the thread for everyone to see: "The soonest I could find is 12pm tomorrow. Reggie is available at 11am, but Lightbody has a job interview so it won't work". WHOOPS.

I think the other comments in this thread have the right idea of it: for this to really work safely, the permissions model needs to be nailed down, and it may mean that you end up with multiple identities of "Claude Tag" (or whatever agent you engage with in a public forum), and the context it gets is only the context that particular identity is entitled to, just like any other employee. But then that gets tedious because now I've got even MORE "people" to keep track of and know who to engage with, which is half the problem getting work done in large enterprises.

Will be interesting to see how this evolves. I'll have my popcorn out :)