Workday and Anthropic Announce New Partnership to Connect Reasoning to the Rules That Run the Business, Wherever People Choose to Work
October 13, 2026
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News Release Issued: Oct 13, 2026 (9:00am EDT)
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https://newsroom.workday.com/2026-10-13-Workday-and-Anthropic-Announce-New-Partnership-to-Connect-Reasoning-to-the-Rules-That-Run-the-Business,-Wherever-People-Choose-to-Work
Workday and Anthropic Announce New Partnership to Connect Reasoning to the
Rules That Run the Business, Wherever People Choose to Work
Video(1)
People Can Find Workday Information, Take Action, and Approve Work Through
Sana Agents in Claude - Workday's Permissions and Business Rules Apply to
Every Request, and the User Confirms Every Change
Sana Handles Complex, Long-Running HR and Finance Work and Calls on Claude's
Reasoning for Individual Steps, While Keeping the Data Inside Workday
LAS VEGAS, Oct. 13, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Workday Rising 2026 - Workday,
Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY), the trusted agentic platform for HR, finance, and IT,
and Anthropic today announced a new partnership that connects their platforms
and agentic experiences, bringing Claude's frontier reasoning together with
Sana AI agents and Workday's trusted data and business context in HR and
finance. The experience will come to life in either Sana, Workday's agentic
experience and orchestration layer, or in Claude, depending on the work being
done.
With the new partnership, people can start work in Claude or in Sana, with
their context and controls intact in each. Claude and Sana exchange
information and tasks through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open
standard, so work carries forward rather than starting over.
People can start work in Sana or in Claude, with their context and controls
intact in each:
In Sana: Sana orchestrates Workday's agents through complex HR and finance
work, taking processes that would have previously taken weeks, like a
compensation cycle or the financial close, and turning them into processes
that happen continuously behind the scenes. It holds the context of the
process from start to finish and builds the workspace each task needs, such as
a live compensation grid or an exceptions queue, without moving data out of
Workday. For example, when a step calls for it, such as drafting the note a
manager shares to explain an employee's raise, Sana calls on Claude's
reasoning and shares only the context that step needs, while exceptions go to
a person for review.In Claude: Employees can access Sana AI agents, analyze
Workday HR and finance data, and take action right within Claude. For example,
a hiring manager can compare open roles against existing headcount and budget,
then build an internal mobility plan that fills those roles with people
already on the team. A finance leader can check invoice exceptions against
purchase orders then approve them in Claude or route them to Sana. Every
action follows the customer's existing permissions and audit controls in
Workday, and Claude surfaces only what that person is permitted to see.With
Agent-Ready Tools: Joint customers will also be able to build their own agents
directly in Claude using Workday Agent-Ready Tools, with the same governance,
security, and audit trail built in from the start. Whichever way they come in,
the rules stay anchored in Workday, and admins connect once, with no new
permission model to build and no per-user setup.
"Customers want the best domain AI agents for both their people and money that
understand the business rules they run on and leverage the extraordinary
reasoning in Claude," said Gerrit Kazmaier, president, product and technology,
Workday. "Together, Workday Sana and Claude unlock lawful AI across the
enterprise to get real work done."
"HR and finance decisions shape every employee's pay, role, and career.
Workday is where that work gets done and where the rules governing it are
built, for thousands of organizations. Claude brings the reasoning to help
people make those decisions faster and with more confidence. Together, they
let Workday customers plan a compensation cycle or close the books, with their
own controls applied at every step," said Ankur Sinha, head of engineering,
enterprise and verticals at Anthropic.
A Partnership Built on Trusted Customer Relationships
The trust behind this partnership is not new, with both companies having
already invested heavily in each other. Anthropic is a Workday customer, with
its finance and people operations on Workday Financials and Workday Human
Capital Management (HCM). It relies on the same Workday governance, rules,
approvals and audit controls to help run its own business.
Workday builds with Claude, too. Workday has rolled out Claude Enterprise,
with plans to start to leverage Cowork. Claude helps power Workday's own
engineering and go-to-market teams, including Claude Code, which Workday's
product and development teams use to build Workday's products. Workday
Developer Agent also connects to Claude to help developers build on Workday.
Sana in Claude builds on the partnership, bringing Sana and Workday
Agent-Ready Tools to joint customers in Claude with Workday's permissions and
controls intact.
Looking ahead, Workday and Anthropic will continue to collaborate on the
roadmap for Sana and Claude, expanding the ways the two experiences work
together as customer needs evolve.
Availability
Sana in Claude plugin is now available to early access customers and expected
to be generally available in late 2026.Workday Agent-Ready Tools are now
generally available to all customers through Workday Extend AI and will be
available to customers via the plugin later this year..
For More Information
Read about how Sana brings the agentic experience to every employee.Learn how
Workday's Trusted Agent Platform now delivers headless access to HR and
finance.Register and attend Workday Rising sessions in the digital
program:Office of the CIO Keynote: The Agent-Ready Platform [26-KEY6], Oct. 13
at 11:00am PT.The Anthropic Blueprint for Hypergrowth Finance [26-INLF1960],
Oct. 13 at 1:45pm PT.
About Anthropic
Anthropic is a frontier AI company whose mission is to steer the trajectory of
AI to advance human progress. We are best known for building Claude, the
intelligence platform trusted by millions of people and businesses worldwide.
Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, a for-profit committed to
operating in service of social and public good, and controlled by a Long
Term Benefit Trust, a group of independent experts in AI safety, national
security, public policy, and social enterprise.
About Workday
Workday operates at the heart of the enterprise - HR, finance, and IT -
where the margin for error is effectively zero. By tightly coupling AI with
the context, guardrails, and trusted processes that run the business, Workday
goes beyond AI that assists with work to agents that are capable of driving
measurable outcomes. More than 11,500 organizations worldwide, including more
than 65% of the Fortune 500, trust Workday to deliver. For more information
about Workday, visit workday.com.
© 2026 Workday, Inc. All rights reserved. Workday and the Workday logo are
registered trademarks of Workday, Inc. All other brand and product names are
trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
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