Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion: What They Are, How They Work and How to Use Them

By Ammar Ahamed, Founder, Cocoon · 16 October 2026 · Sources checked 16 October 2026

What Anthropic launched on 8 October

Since mid-September, everything Claude makes for you, whether a document, a deck, a design or a small tool, is an artifact: it opens beside the chat and is saved in your Artifacts tab. On 8 October, Anthropic added two new artifact types, Dashboards and Motion, both in beta. In the same announcement, Docs, Slides and Design came out of beta, and Anthropic said people had made more than 45 million docs, decks and designs in Claude since 16 September.

The idea behind both features is the same: take the numbers and reports you already have and turn them into something people will actually look at, without opening a BI tool or a video editor.

Claude Dashboards explained

A Claude dashboard is a set of charts built from a question, not from a drag-and-drop editor. You ask something like “Build a dashboard of this quarter’s revenue by region”. Claude writes a SQL query for each chart, runs it against your connected data source and lays out the result.

What it connects to

• Data warehouses: Amazon Redshift, BigQuery, ClickHouse, Databricks and Snowflake.
• Business apps through connectors: Anthropic’s example is Salesforce opportunities.
• Files: reviewers found you can also paste a CSV or upload a spreadsheet. The data is then stored inside the dashboard as a snapshot rather than queried live (hands-on review).

How it keeps you honest

This is the part we like most. Click any number to see the query behind it, or ask Claude to explain it in plain English. Each chart shows when its data was last refreshed. If a number looks wrong, open the query and tell Claude what to fix.

Does it update automatically?

Anthropic says a dashboard “stays current as the data changes”. In practice, charts backed by a live connector fetch fresh data when the dashboard opens or when you refresh it. Anthropic has not documented a background schedule, so check each chart’s refresh time before you present it.

What it is not

Anthropic’s own FAQ is clear that Dashboards does not replace your BI tools. Think of it as the fastest way to answer a question and share the answer, not as a governed reporting layer.

How to build a Claude dashboard, step by step

1. Connect your data. Add a warehouse or app connector in Claude. On Team and Enterprise plans your admin may need to enable it first.
2. Start the dashboard. Ask for one in any chat, select Output in the message box and choose Dashboards, or open the Artifacts tab and pick a Dashboards template.
3. Ask a question, not for a chart. “Which regions grew fastest this quarter, and which products drove it?” works better than “make a bar chart”. Name the table or app if you know it.
4. Check the numbers. Click two or three key figures and read the queries. Make sure the date ranges and definitions match how your company counts things.
5. Refine in chat. “Add a filter by product line”, “switch to a weekly view”, “show last year as a comparison line”.
6. Share it, or send it on to Amplitude, Grafana, Hex, Mixpanel, Omni, Perplexity, PostHog or Sigma. Anthropic listed Databricks Genie, Looker, monday.com and Tableau as coming soon.

Three prompts to try:

Sharing and permissions: read this before you share

• Dashboards start private. Open one and click Share.
• Each viewer sees only their own data. By default, queries run with the viewer’s own connections, so someone without access to a source sees an error in that section instead of your numbers. Two colleagues can see different numbers on the same dashboard.
• Snapshots are different. Data from a pasted CSV or a one-time extract lives inside the dashboard, so anyone who can open the dashboard can read it.
• Public links. The launch post says dashboards can be shared beyond your organisation if your admin allows it. But Anthropic’s help pages say artifacts that use connectors cannot be shared with “anyone with the link”. Assume live, connector-backed dashboards stay with signed-in Claude users.

Claude Motion explained

Claude Motion turns your content into a short animation that plays like a video. Anthropic’s examples are a 30-second all-hands explainer made from a quarterly report, an animated chart for a board deck, and a product walkthrough for customer onboarding.

The important detail is how it works. Motion does not use a video generation model. Claude writes code that animates your text, charts, shapes and images. That has two consequences:

• It is precise and editable. Change one word, number or timing and everything else stays exactly as it was. Generative video tools would give you a whole new clip.
• It will not invent footage or people. There is no realistic video and no AI presenters. For that, you hand off to a partner tool.

It is the same ability that produced the wave of videos in our roundup of 132 Claude Opus 5.5 motion graphics, wrapped in a simple interface inside the Claude app.

How to make a Claude Motion animation, step by step

1. Start it. Ask for an animation in any chat, select Output and choose Motion, or open the Artifacts tab and pick a Motion template.
2. Brief it properly. Anthropic’s advice: say who will watch, where it will play and roughly how long it should be, and attach the report, data or images Claude should use.
3. Edit it. Ask in chat (“slow down the second scene”, “update the Q3 figure”) or edit directly in the editor.
4. Export or hand off. Click Export and choose MP4. Or send it to Adobe (it opens in Firefly Video Editor), Descript, HeyGen, Higgsfield, invideo, Luma AI or Runway to add footage, voice or edits. Canva and Captions were announced as coming soon.

Want to go further than Motion allows, or not on a Team plan? Our complete guide to making videos with Claude Opus 5.5 covers the Claude Code routes.

Using Dashboards and Motion together

Anthropic groups both features under the same idea: show your numbers. They are separate tools, but they fit naturally into one workflow:

1. Answer the question with a dashboard. “How did enrolments change this quarter, by programme and region?”
2. Find the story. Ask Claude which two or three findings matter most and why.
3. Animate the headline. In Motion: “Turn these three findings into a 30-second explainer for the all-hands, with the regional chart building up bar by bar.”
4. Put it where people will see it. Drop the MP4 into your Claude Slides deck, your LinkedIn post or your internal newsletter.

The dashboard keeps the numbers checkable; the animation makes them memorable. A quarterly business review that used to take a week of spreadsheet wrangling and slide design can now be drafted in an afternoon. A person still needs to check the numbers and the story.

Ideas by team

Plans and admin settings

For Enterprise admins: both toggles live in Organization settings > Artifacts, and you can limit them to specific groups with custom roles. Dashboards also needs code execution and file creation switched on under Capabilities, plus artifact connectors. Organisations set up for HIPAA can enable both, but they are not covered by the business associate agreement (admin guide).

How they compare with ChatGPT, Gemini, Power BI and Notion

Limits and criticism worth knowing

• Definitions can drift. One hands-on reviewer found correct numbers but a date-logic bug visible only in the formula panel. Check the queries behind your headline numbers.
• No semantic layer by default. Unless your connector exposes one, Claude decides what “revenue” or “active user” means. Tell it.
• Live or snapshot is not obvious. Reviewers noted the interface does not clearly label which charts query live and which hold extracted data.
• No documented refresh schedule, row limits or chart limits yet.
• Motion is Team and Enterprise only. Some reviewers pointed out the oddity that a Max subscriber cannot use it while a Team seat can.
• Motion is for short, clean animations. It does no generated footage and has no keyframe timeline. Motion designers have called the defaults basic; good briefs and references fix most of that.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Anthropic. Introducing Claude Dashboards and Claude Motion, 8 October 2026.
2. Claude Help Center. Get started with Claude Dashboards.
3. Claude Help Center. Get started with Claude Motion.
4. Claude Help Center. What are artifacts, artifacts admin guide and sharing artifacts.
5. Anthropic. Artifacts feature page and FAQ and pricing.
6. The New Stack. Claude Dashboards and Motion.
7. The Verge. Claude can now turn data into animated explainers.
8. Max Nardit. Claude Dashboards and Motion, hands-on.
9. Tabular Editor. What are Claude Dashboards?
10. eesel AI. Claude Dashboards review and Claude Motion review.
11. Adobe via FutureFive. Adobe adds Claude Motion hand-off. Luma. Luma and Claude Motion. Runway. Runway and Claude Motion.
12. OpenAI. Put your data to work. Google Cloud. Gemini at Work 2026. Microsoft. Copilot in Power BI. Notion. Dashboards.