Claude Gmail can now send, reply, and forward from a user’s account. Anthropic posted the change on August 18 and spelled it out in its Google Workspace connector docs. Ask Claude to reply to a thread, and it drafts and sends the response. The company says users still control when Claude needs approval. Instead of stopping at a draft, Claude can now finish the send after that check.
What actually changed
The Gmail connector already searched, summarized, and drafted. The missing piece was hitting Send. Now Claude can send a new message, reply in a thread, or forward mail. It can also manage files in Google Drive, including share, move, trash, and upload, with the same approval rule.
Official @claudeai says the send feature is available on all paid plans. Users connect Gmail or Drive from the connectors menu. Meanwhile, the same help page still says Workspace connectors work for all users on Claude and Claude Desktop. So treat the paid-plan line as the send announcement, not as proof that free users lost the older read tools.
Team and Enterprise owners still gate the org first. Then each person signs into their own Google account. Claude only sees the connected mailbox, and it mirrors existing Google permissions.
Approval stays the default
By default, Claude asks before it sends, replies, or forwards. Users can change that setting. On Team and Enterprise, owners decide whether members may skip the prompt. That is the real story, not a claim that mail now goes out with no checkpoint.
A sent message is harder to unwind than a draft. Therefore the prompt should stay on unless the user trusts the thread and the wording. Anthropic also notes Claude cannot read Gmail attachment contents, only metadata. Some advanced filters may fail, and Google API quotas still apply.
This sits next to earlier Claude tool work. Paid Claude voice mode already pulled Gmail and Slack context into spoken chats. OpenAI, meanwhile, added direct email sending inside ChatGPT this summer. Sending from the assistant is now a table-stakes fight, not a novelty.
