How do you use connectors in ChatGPT and Claude?

Without connectors, an AI assistant only knows what you type or upload. With one, it can look things up in a service you already use: find the agenda in your Drive, check what is on your calendar next Tuesday, or pull the latest version of a shared document. You stay in the conversation, and the assistant tells you which file or event it relied on.

Behind the scenes, most connectors use OAuth, the familiar "Sign in with Google" screen where the service asks whether you allow another app to reach your data. You never give the assistant your password; you grant it a permission that you can later withdraw. Many connectors are also built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which Anthropic published in November 2024 as a shared, open way to plug AI apps into tools and data, and which OpenAI now uses for custom connections too.

What the two assistants call them

The words have shifted, so it helps to know the current labels. On December 17, 2025, OpenAI renamed ChatGPT's connectors to apps. Nothing was removed: a "chat connector" is now an app with file search, a deep research connector is an app with deep research, and a synced connector is an app with sync. Interactive apps such as Canva or Zillow live in the same place.

Claude added a Google Workspace integration in April 2025 covering Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs, and in May 2025 it added support for remote MCP servers so other services, such as Asana, Linear or Zapier, could be connected the same way. Claude cites the emails, events or documents it used, so you can open the original and check.

Setting up Drive and Calendar, step by step

In ChatGPT

1. Open Settings → Apps (or the app directory) and find Google Drive.
2. Click Connect, then complete Google's sign-in and permission screen.
3. Repeat for Google Calendar if you need it.
4. In a chat, call the app with an @ mention, or click +, then More, and choose it.

In Claude

1. Open your settings and find the Google Workspace services. When Anthropic launched them, the switch was in profile settings.
2. Connect Calendar and Drive, and sign in with the Google account you want Claude to see.
3. On a Team or Enterprise plan, an administrator must first allow Google Workspace for the whole organization; until then, the option will not work for individual users.

A worked request

Here is a request that uses both connectors and keeps the assistant in a read-only role:

Using my Google Calendar, list my meetings from Monday to Wednesday next week with their times.
For each meeting, search my Google Drive for a document whose title contains the meeting name or "agenda", and give me its link.
Then write a one-paragraph brief for each meeting from those documents.
Do not create, change or delete any event or file. If you cannot find a document, say so instead of guessing.
Cite the event or file you used for every line.

A good answer lists three or four meetings, links the agenda files it found and flags the ones it could not match. The last two lines of the prompt matter: they keep the task to reading, and they ask for citations so you can check the result in seconds.

A quick way to decide which connectors to switch on is to sort your tasks:

How do you limit what each connector can read?

Start with the principle security teams call least privilege: give each connector the smallest access that does the job, for the shortest time it is needed. In practice that means connecting one service for one kind of task, rather than everything at once, and turning a connector off in the chat when the task does not need it.

Watch for actions, not just reading. Some ChatGPT apps can create or update information in the connected service, and OpenAI's policy requires apps to ask you before acting outside ChatGPT. Read those confirmations instead of clicking through them. If you only want summaries, say so in your prompt, as in the example above.

Check what flows the other way, too. OpenAI's help page explains that an app may see relevant parts of your conversation and, if Memory is on, your memories, along with basic details such as your approximate location. On Free, Go, Plus and Pro plans, information read through apps can be used to improve models if the "Improve the model for everyone" setting is on, so review that switch under data controls. Business, Enterprise and Edu data is not used for training by default.

Finally, clean up. Disconnect apps you no longer use from Settings → Apps in ChatGPT and from the matching settings in Claude, and review the list of third-party apps in your Google Account's security settings, where you can remove access for good. In a company workspace, administrators can go further: they decide which apps are enabled, who may use them, and, in ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu, which actions an app may take and with what limits.