Thanks to an extension to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Anthropic’s Claude can now display other applications’ interfaces within the chat window.
Claude has long been able to retrieve data from third-party applications through MCP server connections. This feature has been expanded to display user interface elements such as charts, forms, and dashboards, and allows you to interact with third-party apps from within the chat window.
“Claude is already connecting to your tools and performing actions on your behalf,” the company said in a blog post. “These tools now appear in conversations so we can see what’s happening and collaborate in real time.”
This change makes Claude’s chat environment more like a cross-application interface layer, where users no longer need to switch application focus to access application-specific tools. For operating system manufacturers like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, it can pose a similar challenge to web browsers. This reduces the need to interact with the operating system.
And Claude isn’t the only one who benefits. The extension, called MCP Apps, will also be available for AI applications from other vendors, including Goose, Visual Studio Code, and ChatGPT, either today or soon.
MCP Apps Extension (SEP-1865) was first proposed in November 2025 and is based on MCP-UI and OpenAI Apps SDK. This allows the MCP server to deliver interactive user interface elements that the host can render during the conversation, rather than just returning data.
“MCP Apps addresses a real gap between what agent tools can deliver and how users naturally want to interact with agent tools,” Clare Liguori, a senior principal engineer at AWS, said in a comment accompanying the MCP blog post. “Being able to render dynamic interfaces directly within a conversation makes it easier to leverage the power of MCP Server in a practical way.”
Initially, this ability to proxy within Claude is limited to Anthropic’s launch partners Amplitude, Asana, Box, Canva, Clay, Figma, Hex, monday.com, Slack, and (soon) Salesforce. But we expect its scope to expand over time as other software makers adapt their apps.
Claude’s Figma image via MCP Apps extension – click to enlarge
MCP Apps display third-party interface elements in iframes, but also provides additional functionality such as logging events for debugging, opening links in the user’s browser, sending follow-up messages, and updating the context of the underlying model.
“Running the UI from an MCP server means running code you didn’t write within the MCP host,” MCP’s post explains, citing various security layers such as an iframe sandbox, pre-declared templates for common HTML content before rendering, auditable messages, and host management authorization for tool calls initiated by the UI.
Whether these protections prove sufficient to avoid the emergence of new risks will be tested in time. ®
