Carl Johnson, a sales development leader at Anthropic, shares how a Claude-powered buying agent now answers most inbound customers, and how that changed the way our sales team works. Category Enterprise AI Product Claude Platform Date September 30, 2026 Reading time 5 min Share Copy link https://claude.com/blog/how-anthropics-sales-team-rebuilt-inbound-with-claude-managed-agents Author(s) Carl Johnson As a sales leader, it pains me to admit that not long ago, people who wanted to buy Claude for their company weren’t getting the answers they needed quickly enough. They had filled out our Contact Sales form but would wait too long to hear back, sometimes for multiple days. Most of their questions were simple: what a plan costs, whether there's a seat minimum, or whether we can meet HIPAA’s contract requirements. The answers were in our documentation and support articles, but customers wanted someone to walk them through, quickly. So we built a buying agent on Claude Managed Agents (beta) that takes a prospect from "I want Claude for my company" to a completed purchase. …
Anthropic made Claude for Government generally available to U.S. federal and state agencies, offering coding and agentic capabilities through a FedRAMP High authorized environment. The platform includes purpose-built governance controls, audit logs, and usage-based billing with no seat fees. Claude Code CLI and Claude for Microsoft 365 are also available in early access through the same environment.
World Labs has signed a definitive agreement to join AMD. Dr. Fei-Fei Li will become an Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist at AMD, working with CEO Dr. Lisa Su. Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue leading the World Labs team as it joins AMD to form a frontier research organization focused on an open AI ecosystem. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
Amazon Bedrock now offers Anthropic's Claude Opus 5, Claude Sonnet 5, and Claude Haiku 4.5 through an India regional endpoint using geographic cross-Region inference, allowing customers to process data locally within India while accessing these models.
Lovable is partnering with Microsoft so that apps built with Lovable can be published into a company's own Microsoft tenant via the Copilot Managed Runtime SDK, with sign-in through Microsoft Entra ID and management like any other Microsoft app. The integration also lets Lovable apps read and write Microsoft 365, Fabric, Dataverse, and SQL data without exporting or copying it. Copilot Managed Runtime is rolling out in public preview, while the Microsoft 365 connectors, Fabric, and Microsoft sign-in are available on every Lovable plan today.
xAI launched Team Bots, which are shared Grok Bots that teams can give access to files, apps, and expertise, and that learn from team interactions. Each Team Bot can be configured with context, plugins, credentials, and memories, and can be used in Slack with its own handle. The announcement includes examples of use at SpaceXAI for sales, engineering, marketing, and data analytics.
Amazon Bedrock now offers in-region inference for Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 and Claude Sonnet 5 in Seoul and Claude Sonnet 5 in Singapore, enabling data processing entirely within the specified region to meet data residency requirements. The service is available on the bedrock-runtime endpoint and supports the Anthropic Messages API, Amazon Bedrock InvokeModel and Converse APIs, along with features like Guardrails and intelligent prompt routing.
Some of the world’s most critical databases run in places where cloud connectivity cannot be assumed. A remote industrial site, for example, may need production systems to continue operating when external connectivity is unavailable. A regulated organization may need sensitive data and processing to remain within sovereign boundaries. Today, SQL Server on Azure Local is generally available for connected and disconnected operations. With this release, customers can modernize where their data resides while maintaining control over infrastructure, connectivity, and data placement. They can bring AI closer to their data with Foundry Local on Azure Local, currently in preview, and use eligible existing SQL Server licensing investments. Explore SQL Server on Azure Local Run SQL Server where your data needs to stay SQL Server has a long history of supporting mission-critical workloads on customer infrastructure. Azure Local builds on that flexibility by bringing Azure infrastructure to customer-owned environments, giving organizations a consistent platform for running SQL Server across datacenters and edge locations. …
We recently identified and disrupted a coordinated campaign designed to extract protected reasoning from our models, with the earliest observed activity occurring in the first week of July. This activity is consistent with adversarial distillation: the systematic and unauthorized use of one model’s outputs or reasoning to help train, reproduce, or improve another model. Protected reasoning is the model’s internal record for working through a task; extracting it can reveal information withheld from the final answer and help others reproduce the model’s capabilities. The operators did not break our encryption, compromise a database, or gain direct access to stored user conversations. Instead, they manipulated model interactions so that protected reasoning could be reproduced in forms visible to the requester in a coordinated, scaled manner that violated our terms of service. This manipulation is not a vulnerability unique to OpenAI’s models, and we have shared information about it with industry partners through the Frontier Model Forum in order to strengthen collective defenses against adversarial distillation. …
Basis, which builds AI agents for accountants, reported that GPT-6 Astra completed a 50-tab tax workbook in half the time of GPT-5.6 Sol and improved its internal evaluation scores by about 20%. The company attributed the gains to GPT-6 Astra's better understanding of user intent and its ability to adjust reasoning effort during tasks.
In June, during internal training and evaluation our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not authorised to. We also should have handled our response better. We are sorry and working to do better in the future. In this post, we are setting out what we know, what we have changed, and what we will do to rebuild trust with the Australian people. This is a new kind of cyber incident which represents an emerging global challenge. One of the ways we intend to take accountability for the situation is to be intentional in working with Australia to help develop practical approaches to how AI developers and governments identify, disclose, and respond to AI cyber behaviour, whether malicious or unintentional. When we became aware and how we responded to this incident After the Hugging Face incident in July, we began reviewing earlier training and evaluation activity to identify other affected organisations. In mid-August, that review identified activity affecting the Australian government websites below. Here’s what we know based on the evidence: …
