On May 6, the Code with Claude conference opened in San Francisco. Orbit works for you without being asked, pulling data from Gmail, Slack, and GitHub.
Article author and source: AI New Era
Claude has launched a major new feature: an active AI assistant!
On the eve of the Code with Claude developer conference, someone uncovered an unreleased feature module in the latest build of Claude Cowork.
The name is Orbit.
On May 4, the technical intelligence platform TestingCatalog published an article titled "Anthropic is working on Orbit, its upcoming proactive assistant."
This intelligence was discovered in a typical manner—someone noticed a newly appeared toggle switch in the settings panel of Anthropic’s latest web and mobile clients, with no functional description or button.
On Threads, researcher @btibor91 further uncovered that the hidden flag for this feature is called "tibro enabled"—"orbit" spelled backward.
This kind of internal naming joke (naming a feature flag with the opposite meaning) isn't uncommon in Silicon Valley, but it usually means:
This is a real, upcoming feature currently in development; the engineering team has already prepared the toggle for gradual rollout and is just waiting for the go-ahead at the conference.
May 6 marks the first stop of Anthropic's Code with Claude annual developer conference in San Francisco (London on May 19, Tokyo on June 10).
Orbit is likely to make its official debut on that day.
What is Orbit?
By expanding on the details in the testingcatalog article, we can get an early glimpse of this new feature.
Orbit is positioned as an active briefing and insights system, spanning both the Claude and Claude Code platforms.
This means that whether you're a regular knowledge worker or a programmer, you'll use the same Orbit.
Among them, the integrated connectors include Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Calendar, Drive, and Figma. This is the initial list of connectors.
The mechanism is opt-in (user-initiated activation) plus timezone detection.
The output format is a personalized briefing containing actionable insights extracted from connected work tools.
Orbit Apps: Deployable and pinable.
The original description implies that Orbit is more than just a newsletter distributor—it may have an underlying application ecosystem.
Simply put: You no longer need to open Claude to ask it to check your important Gmail emails for today.
Orbit automatically generates a daily briefing for you based on multiple tools.
It knows what meetings you have today, how many @mentions you have in Slack, how many PRs on GitHub await your review, which designs the designer updated in Figma, and which sections of a document in Drive were modified by a colleague last night.
If you were a product manager and opened Claude at 9 a.m., you might see a briefing like this—there’s a sprint review at 10:00 a.m., and PR #2371 is waiting for your review; Marie has updated the second version of the login page on Figma and needs your yes or no; the CFO replied last night to your budget confirmation email sent on Tuesday and is inclined to approve.
Three things, three systems, one briefing.
This is a shift in product form from passive prompts to active push notifications.
The challenge lies not in the model, but in product judgment—what to promote, what to hold back, when to promote, and where to promote.
Over the past year, all the connectors, schedulers, and compute control capabilities Anthropic deployed on Cowork were essentially in preparation for this moment.
Four months of Claude Cowork
To understand where Orbit fits within Anthropic’s product lineup, first trace the evolution of Claude Cowork.
This feature took only four months from inception to preparation for deployment on Orbit.
It’s important to highlight the SaaS sell-off in February.
On the day Cowork officially launched its enterprise version and in the following trading days, the market feared that Anthropic’s general-purpose AI collaboration tool would replace a large number of specialized SaaS products—Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday—all saw their stock prices decline, resulting in a combined market value loss of approximately $285 billion.
This event marked the turning point where Cowork truly entered the mainstream business landscape.
From Cowork’s functional evolution path, Orbit is the logical next step—
- Connectors (Fetch Data)
- Plugins (Third-Party Integration)
- Scheduled Tasks (Time-Triggered)
- Dispatch (Task Assignment)
- Projects (Multi-task Orchestration)
- Computer Use (Automated Computer Operation)
- → Orbit (Active Brief + Insights)
After Anthropic has established foundational capabilities such as reading, writing, accessing, scheduling, and operating, they combine them into a product form that no longer requires prompts.
It is worth noting that this product cadence has been the norm for Anthropic over the past year.
From its public release in May 2025 to April 2026, Claude Code achieved an annualized revenue exceeding $2.5 billion.
Cowork went from research preview to enterprise version plus Orbit in just four months.
In early 2026, Anthropic completed a $30 billion Series G round, valuing the company at $380 billion—a pace fueled by ample capital supporting product expansion.
Active AI赛道: Pulse, Gemini, Orbit
Orbit is not a one-of-a-kind item.
It’s in a赛道 that’s already heating up.
ChatGPT Pulse—released by OpenAI in September 2025—is its first proactive, asynchronous assistant. Pulse delivers a personalized daily briefing each morning, based on your recent conversations with ChatGPT and integrated with Gmail and Calendar connectors. At launch, it was positioned as OpenAI’s first initiative to enable ChatGPT to initiate contact with users.
Google Gemini Proactive Assistance: Scheduled for demonstration at the Google I/O conference on May 15, the concept involves providing timely recommendations using personal data.
Similar products to Perplexity: Industry insiders have mentioned multiple media outlets, but the specific forms have not yet been disclosed.
Orbit's differentiation is well analyzed in the testing catalog:
The connectors for OpenAI Pulse and Google Gemini primarily consist of email and calendar combinations such as Gmail, Calendar, and Memory, while Orbit explicitly includes GitHub and Figma.
This means its target users are not executives who only read emails, but rather product creators—developers, designers, and product managers.
Anthropic’s differentiated approach explicitly includes GitHub and Figma, aligning with its product positioning for developers and creative workflows.
This differentiation aligns with Anthropic’s overall product positioning.
Claude Code's annualized revenue exceeded $2.5 billion in early 2026, and Anthropic already had stronger mindshare among developers than the other two companies.
Orbit's integration with GitHub and Figma adds a product-specific workflow awareness layer on top of Cowork, a universal tool for knowledge workers.
The era of passive prompts is coming to an end.
Put these together—
Over the past six months, the three leading AI companies virtually synchronized their transition to this new form of proactive assistants.
This means the next frontier for AI products is no longer about answering your questions better, but about having already reviewed everything you should have seen today—here are the conclusions and recommendations.
From the user’s perspective, passive prompts and active briefs are two entirely different products—the former is a tool, the latter is an assistant.
The former requires you to think through your question each time you use it, while the latter delivers pre-processed information to you every morning.
If Orbit launches as scheduled on May 6, it will be Anthropic’s direct response to ChatGPT Pulse and a crucial step in Cowork’s evolution from a tool to an assistant.
It took four months for this curve to complete the tool segment; over the next four months, the assistant segment is likely to be filled at a similar pace by various platforms.
What happens next depends on the conference.
A few more details cannot be overlooked
First, Orbit will likely prioritize Max subscribers.
This aligns with Claude Code and Cowork’s monetization strategy—rolling out premium features first to the highest-paying users, then expanding them more broadly once proven.
Second, the timing of the discovery is too coincidental.
The code was dug up on May 4, and the Code with Claude conference took place on May 6. There was only a 48-hour gap between the leak and the official release—this was either a genuine leak or a carefully orchestrated pre-launch campaign.
Third, Orbit's technical implementation path is worth noting.
Automatically generating personalized insights means Claude must continuously run in the background, constantly ingest user data, and continuously perform reasoning. This places a massive burden on Anthropic’s infrastructure—no longer is it a matter of running a single inference per user message, but rather continuously “thinking” on behalf of each user, 24/7.
The cost structure is completely different from before.