Anthropic has expanded access to Claude’s advanced tools, including Projects, Memory, file creation, Connectors, and Skills, making essential productivity features available for free and reshaping AI assistant capabilities.
Anthropic has steadily turned Claude’s free tier into something far more capable than a simple chat interface. Features that once sat behind paid plans, including Projects, Memory, file creation, Connectors and Skills, have increasingly been made available without a subscription. The shift matters because it addresses one of the biggest weaknesses of AI assistants: continuity across tasks, files and conversations.
Projects are one of the clearest examples. Anthropic launched them in June 2024 as dedicated workspaces with separate chat histories and knowledge bases, so Claude can stay focused on the material attached to that project instead of pulling in unrelated context from elsewhere. Free users can now create up to five Projects, although Anthropic still reserves enhanced project knowledge, based on retrieval-augmented generation, for paying customers. The result is a more structured way to organise work, even if the deepest knowledge features remain premium.
Memory followed a similar path. Anthropic began rolling it out on paid plans in late 2025, first to Team users and then to Enterprise, Max and Pro, before adding it to the free plan in March 2026. The feature lets Claude retain useful details such as role, preferences, ongoing tasks and technical habits, and users can review, edit or delete what the system stores. That makes each new chat less disposable and more useful for repeated work.
File creation is another important change. Claude can generate and edit Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and PDFs directly, with Anthropic saying the work is carried out in a sandboxed code environment. According to Claude’s help centre, this capability is now available to all users across web, desktop and mobile. It is a practical upgrade because it moves Claude beyond drafting text and into producing finished files.
Connectors have also moved down the stack. Anthropic first introduced them under the earlier name Integrations for higher-tier users, then expanded them to the free plan with the February 2026 Sonnet 4.6 launch. The company says web Connectors are available to all users, while custom Connectors are also supported on the free tier, albeit with a limit of one. That gives Claude access to external services such as email, calendars and workplace tools, reducing the copy-and-paste work that often defines AI use in practice.
Skills complete the picture. These are reusable instruction sets, scripts and resources that teach Claude how to handle a task in a consistent way, whether that is producing a spreadsheet, formatting a document or following a specific workflow. Anthropic made them free alongside the Sonnet 4.6 update, and users can also build custom Skills of their own. TechRadar and other outlets have described the move as one that makes Claude feel less like a chat box and more like a general-purpose work environment, though the free plan still carries the usual limits on scale and depth.
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