Google Drive connector

Connect Google Drive and you can ask Claude about your own files without downloading and re-uploading them: “find the onboarding brief and summarize the open decisions.” Claude searches your Drive, reads what it finds and answers. A connector is Claude’s name for a ready-made link to another app that you switch on once.

What it does (plain English)

Anthropic’s documentation says Google builds and runs this connector, and the directory listing marks it Anthropic verified. Each person signs in with their own Google account, so Claude can reach only files that account can open.

The directory listing names 11 tools. Their names map closely to what Claude can do once connected:

Tool	What it lets Claude do
search_files	Search your Drive
list_recent_files	List files you worked on recently
read_file_content	Read a file’s content
download_file_content	Fetch a file’s content for processing
get_file_metadata	Check a file’s details
get_file_permissions	See who a file is shared with
create_file	Upload or create a file
update_file	Change an existing file
copy_file	Copy a file
share_file	Share a file with someone
trash_file	Move a file to the trash

File types Claude can read: Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, OpenDocument files, and PNG and JPEG images.

Is it for you?

Yes, if your work lives in Google Drive and you spend time copying text from Docs into Claude. It is also the cleanest way to give a Claude project a document that keeps changing, because project files picked from Drive refresh from Drive.

If your company uses Microsoft 365, the Microsoft 365 connector covers OneDrive and SharePoint instead.

What you can do with it

1. Find and summarize. “Find the design brief for the onboarding project in my Drive and summarize the open decisions.” This is one of Anthropic’s own example prompts.
2. Check a spreadsheet. “Read the Q3 budget spreadsheet and tell me which lines are over plan.”
3. Catch up. “What files have I worked on in the last week?”
4. Pin a live document to a project. Add your style guide from Drive to a private project’s knowledge; every chat in that project can use it.
5. Save output to Drive. With code execution and file creation on, Claude can save files it generates into Drive, according to Anthropic’s Google Workspace article.

How to set it up

1. Go to Customize > Connectors in claude.ai. In the desktop app, select Customize in the sidebar, then Connectors.
2. Find Google Drive and select Connect. (If you open it from Discover, the button reads Connect to Claude.)
3. Sign in to Google and grant the permissions. In the desktop app the sign-in page opens in your browser.
4. When you are back, the button reads Disconnect and the connector shows as Connected under Your connectors.
5. In any chat, select +, then Connectors, and turn on Google Drive.
6. To attach a specific file, select + > Add from Google Drive and pick it.

Team and Enterprise: Google Drive does not appear until an Owner adds it for the organization. If you see Access blocked, a Google Workspace admin may need to mark Claude as trusted under admin.google.com > Security > Access and data control > API controls > Manage third-party app access. Anthropic says this takes about 15 minutes to apply.

Claude Code: if you sign in to Claude Code with your claude.ai account, connectors you added in claude.ai are available there automatically. They are not loaded when you use an API key or a third-party provider such as Amazon Bedrock.

Watch out for

• Approve sharing and deleting. Claude can share, move and trash files. Anthropic’s article says it asks for approval first by default. Under the connector’s Tool permissions you can set each tool to Always allow, Needs approval or Blocked; consider blocking share_file and trash_file if you only need reading.
• Text only, mostly. Files added to a chat become text: Docs to Markdown without images, Sheets to CSV with every tab, Slides to plain text. Claude cannot read comments or suggested edits.
• Size caps. Google caps exports of Docs, Sheets and Slides at about 10 MB; beyond that Claude gets only the file’s name and details. Very large files can arrive incomplete.
• Projects. Drive files can be added only to private projects. In a shared project the option shows Only accessible from private projects.
• Data handling. Anthropic says it does not train models on data from the Drive, Gmail or Calendar connectors, but on consumer plans content you copy from them into chats may be used if you opted in to training.
• The old open-source server is archived. The MCP reference server for Google Drive (gdrive) was moved to the archived repository. Use this connector instead.

Alternatives

• Gmail connector and Google Calendar for the rest of Google Workspace.
• Google Docs, Sheets and Slides connectors (beta) to edit those files live in a pane beside the chat.
• Filesystem MCP server for files on your own computer rather than in the cloud.