This feature is a little confusing.

It looks to me like a variant of the Code Interpreter pattern, where Claude has a (presumably sandboxed) server-side container environment in which it can run Python. When you ask it to make a spreadsheet it runs this:

  pip install openpyxl pandas --break-system-packages

What's weird is that when you enable it in https://claude.ai/settings/features it automatically disables the old Analysis tool - which used JavaScript running in your browser. For some reason you can have one of those enabled but not both.

The new feature is being described exclusively as a system for creating files though! I'm trying to figure out if that gets used for code analysis too now, in place of the analysis tool.

It works for me on the https://claude.ai web all but doesn't appear to work in the Claude iOS app.

I tried "Tell me everything you can about your shell and Python environments" and got some interesting results after it ran a bunch of commands.

Linux runsc 4.4.0 #1 SMP Sun Jan 10 15:06:54 PST 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS

Python 3.12.3

/usr/bin/node is v18.19.1

Disk Space: 4.9GB total, with 4.6GB available

Memory: 9.0GB RAM

Attempts at making HTTP requests all seem to fail with a 403 error. Suggesting some kind of universal proxy.

But telling it to "Run pip install sqlite-utils" worked, so apparently they have allow-listed some domains such as PyPI.

I poked around more and found these environment variables:

  HTTPS_PROXY=http://21.0.0.167:15001
  HTTP_PROXY=http://21.0.0.167:15001

Anthropic have their own self-issued certificate to intercept HTTPS.

Odds are the new container and old JavaScript are using the same tool names/parameters. Or, perhaps, they found the tools similar enough that the model got confused having them both explained.