Workday Brings Its Sana Agents Into Claude in an Anthropic Partnership and Agrees to Buy Agentic-Identity Startup C1.ai
At Workday Rising on Oct. 13, Workday and Anthropic announced a partnership letting people use Workday's Sana agents and HR and finance data inside Claude under Workday's permissions, and Workday said it signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, an identity platform for people and AI agents. Terms of the C1.ai deal were not disclosed.
Workday and Anthropic announced a partnership on Tuesday, October 13 that lets people work with Workday's Sana agents and HR and finance data from inside Claude, with "Workday's permissions and business rules" applied to every request, according to the companies' release. The same day, Workday said it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire C1.ai, which it describes as an agentic identity platform for people and agents. Both were announced at Workday Rising in Las Vegas.
The Anthropic partnership
According to the release, Claude and Sana exchange information and tasks through the Model Context Protocol. Every action follows the customer's existing permissions and audit controls in Workday, Claude shows only what a person is permitted to see, and the user confirms every change, the companies say. Joint customers can also build their own agents in Claude using Workday Agent-Ready Tools.
The Sana in Claude plugin is available to early-access customers and expected to be generally available in late 2026, the release says. Agent-Ready Tools are generally available through Workday Extend AI.
The release says Anthropic runs its finance and people operations on Workday, and that Workday has rolled out Claude Enterprise.
The C1.ai deal
Workday says C1.ai connects to systems such as email, CRM, code repositories, finance systems and cloud infrastructure to give each person and agent the right access and remove it when no longer needed. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Workday's fiscal 2027, which ends January 31, 2027, subject to customary conditions. Workday did not disclose terms.
In its release, Workday cites C1.ai research that 95% of large U.S. companies already run autonomous agents, and Deloitte research that only 21% report a mature way to govern them. Those figures are as cited by Workday.
Limits
- Both announcements come from Workday's own releases; no independent coverage was used.
- The C1.ai transaction has not closed, and its price was not disclosed.