Workday and Anthropic Announce New Partnership to Connect Reasoning to the Rules That Run the Business, Wherever People Choose to Work

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.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements including, among other things, statements regarding Workday's plans, beliefs, and expectations. These forward-looking statements are based only on currently available information and our current beliefs, expectations, and assumptions. Because forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict and many of which are outside of our control. If the risks materialize, assumptions prove incorrect, or we experience unexpected changes in circumstances, actual results could differ materially from the results implied by these forward-looking statements, and therefore you should not rely on any forward-looking statements. Risks include, but are not limited to, risks described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including our most recent report on Form 10-Q or Form 10-K and other reports that we have filed and will file with the SEC from time to time, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. Workday assumes no obligation to, and does not currently intend to, update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release, except as required by law.

Any unreleased services, features, or functions referenced in this document, our website, or other press releases or public statements that are not currently available are subject to change at Workday's discretion and may not be delivered as planned or at all. Customers who purchase Workday services should make their purchase decisions based upon services, features, and functions that are currently available.

SOURCE Workday Inc.