Thomson Reuters, Anthropic + A Surprise Video

Anthropic is making waves in legal tech for a second time today. They just dropped a range of new plugins, and a surprise video covering their Claude Agent SDK which shows an imagined use of Thomson Reuters CoCounsel – see video below. Meanwhile, TR told AL all about its real Anthropic use. Read on.

So, this gets a bit complicated, but bear with it. First, Anthropic has rolled out a range of new enterprise plugins – these follow the previous ones which included one for legal. (P.S. an agent SDK is ‘a framework that simplifies building and deploying AI agents’, i.e. what you need to deploy all of this.)

As part of this they made a video to show what was possible….but, they added TR CoCounsel into the mix. But…the thing they show doesn’t exist yet officially – see statement from Anthropic, i.e. it was a thought experiment of what you could do by combining CoCo with Claude and plugins, and uses the example of a project about Silvern Capital, which then demands legal input.

Here’s the video.

So, AL asked TR what was going on. Interestingly, they then said that indeed, this was not a real product yet, but….they are working right now very closely with Anthropic. So watch this space. Here’s what they told AL.

‘We are a customer of Anthropic and are using Claude, including the Agent SDK, as part of the architecture powering the next generation of CoCounsel Legal, which we previewed this week. (More to come at Legal week!)

The Agent SDK provides a framework for structuring and running agents. On top of that, Thomson Reuters engineers the domain-specific system — including orchestration, authoritative content integration (Westlaw, Practical Law, etc.), verification layers, and workflow controls required for regulated professional use.

So Anthropic highlighted CoCounsel as a real-world enterprise implementation of Agent SDK and we confirmed that this infrastructure is part of what powers the next generation of CoCounsel Legal.’

And they also added:

‘It’s important to be clear about what that means in practice: the Agent SDK provides a robust framework for building and running agents (for example, structuring multi-step task execution, tool use, and observability). 

On top of that foundation, Thomson Reuters designs and engineers the domain-specific systems our customers require for regulated, high-stakes work — including the software tools that power agentic tool use, workflow orchestration, access controls, grounded retrieval from authoritative sources, and verification/quality layers that support professional standards in legal, tax, risk, and compliance.

In other words, this is not simply “plugging a model into a product.” We are building agentic systems that can break complex professional tasks into steps, use the right tools at the right time, and provide transparency into what the system did and why — with the goal of making AI dependable enough to be used in real production workflows where accuracy, traceability, and trust matter.’

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Is this a big deal?

Well, following on from the related Anthropic news from rival LexisNexis today, we can see what’s happening. In short, the wider Claude Cowork and plugin capabilities are going to become part of all major legal tech companies. Why? As explored in this article here – the reason is that it allows you to create ‘all-encompassing’ actions that combine data, workflows, templates and more, into one larger, connected procedure. And that saves you a lot of time.

Meanwhile, they’ve also announced connectors to LegalZoom and Harvey as well.

More about Anthropic’s new tricks here, the connectors and the Agent SDK here.

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