The Next Phase of Developer Tools with Anthropic and Plaid

On May 1, we launched our first integration with Claude, Anthropic’s state-of-the-art AI assistant, enabling you to run diagnostics and analytics in a chat format. Starting today, you can use those same diagnostics and analytics tools through Anthropic’s API.

This enables you to directly build agents with capabilities to fetch Plaid Link conversion insights, usage metrics, and item debugging directly in the Anthropic API. This integration gives you the flexibility to bring Plaid diagnostics into any agent workflow, whether you're building agents to monitor performance, resolve issues faster, or make a faster, better support experience.

What’s new

This update goes beyond conversational use in Claude.ai. With the new functionality, you can:

• Build custom agents that access Plaid metadata using the Anthropic API

• Automate internal support tasks like investigating items or checking for API errors

• Power in-app AI support that helps users troubleshoot connection issues

• Integrate Plaid data into your dev tools, bots, or interfaces, wherever they live

What an in-app support experience can look like

A user notices that their bank connection isn’t updating correctly. Instead of submitting a ticket, they interact with an AI assistant powered by Anthropic API and the Plaid MCP Server embedded in your app.

Your agent calls the Plaid MCP Server, retrieves diagnostic information about the user’s bank connection, and returns a clear explanation with suggested next steps.

Under the hood
Your AI agent accesses Plaid diagnostics data around the broken bank connection for your user by interfacing with the Plaid MCP Server through your Anthropic API calls.

How it works

Anthropic API’s tool-calling framework now supports remote MCP servers, allowing your agents to fetch real-time data from Plaid.

Setup steps:
1. Generate an OAuth token scoped for MCP access via /oauth/token
2. Configure your Anthropic API calls to connect to tools available through the Plaid MCP Server https://api.dashboard.plaid.com/mcp/sse
3. Pass your token in the request - your agent will be able to call Plaid’s diagnostics and analytics tools

This works wherever you’ve deployed your AI agents powered by Anthropic API and the Plaid MCP Server: web apps, internal bots, customer support surfaces, or dev tools. 

Start building
Get started with Plaid’s MCP Server and the Anthropic API here:
https://plaid.com/docs/mcp/

What’s next

This integration is part of our broader effort to provide our developers with the best AI tools across the tech stack. Our remote MCP Server currently integrates with the Anthropic API, Claude.ai, and OpenAI API, and we expect the ecosystem to grow quickly. 

Coming up next is a development toolkit to help our developers build Plaid integrations faster in their preferred AI Coding tools.  

We’ll be hosting a deep dive session on AI at Plaid Effects—register to learn more.