Anthropic Launches Claude Sheets, Taking Aim at Excel; Microsoft Shares Fall

Anthropic has launched Claude Sheets, a spreadsheet tool built into Claude that creates and edits workbooks from prompts, including multiple tabs, formulas and dropdowns, with export to Excel. It arrived on November 10 as a beta alongside Claude Whiteboards and Claude Data, with a Claude Meetings tool listed as coming soon, all included in paid Claude plans. Bloomberg framed the release as Anthropic taking on Microsoft ahead of its IPO.

MSFT has traded lower on the news. Investing.com reported the shares fell about 2% on November 10 after Bloomberg first reported the tools, and a Yahoo Finance headline put the decline at 2.5%. The weakness carried into November 11, with Microsoft down 2.1% at $522.05 at 1:17 p.m. ET, per SentiSense market data, on a day when several technology names rebounded.

The tension is that Microsoft is also an Anthropic investor and partner: it agreed in November 2025 to invest up to $5 billion, Anthropic committed to buy $30 billion of Azure compute, and Microsoft already uses Anthropic models in some Office features. Anthropic itself calls Sheets fairly basic for now and points heavier users to its Claude for Excel add-in, so the near-term threat to Excel's installed base is limited.

What to watch: adoption of the new tools once Anthropic lists, with its IPO of 825 million shares at $70 to $78 expected to trade next Thursday, and whether Microsoft responds with deeper AI features in Excel or a change in how it works with Anthropic.