Five Steps In Two Minutes. The Three It Skips Are The Authentication.

The card itself is a shopping list: thirty-three tools for marketing and sales, eleven per column, each with a one-line reason to care. It carries one of the better footers we have read — more on that at the end.

The caption is where the work is. It offers a five-step recipe to connect an MCP connector “in under 2 minutes”: open Settings, click Integrations, paste the MCP URL, name it, save. We checked those five steps against the support article for custom connectors.

The documented flow has eight steps. The three the caption leaves out are the three about authentication.

Diagram: the five steps against the documented eight

The three missing steps are the ones worth two minutes

A wrong menu name costs you thirty seconds of hunting. The authentication screens are different: they are where you decide what this server can do on your behalf, and the support article is blunt about why that matters.

Custom connectors link Claude to “services that haven’t been verified by Anthropic.”

“Only connect to trusted servers” — servers built and hosted by organizations you trust.

“Malicious servers may hide instructions meant to make Claude act unintentionally.”

“Server developers may update tool behavior unexpectedly, leading to unintended or malicious behavior.”

Read the last one twice. A connector you vetted in October is not the same connector in January, and nothing asks you again.

There is a further line for teams. On Team and Enterprise plans, a shared fixed credential means “everyone who uses the connector reaches the service with that same credential” — so whatever that key can do, every colleague can do, under one identity in the service’s logs.

None of that makes connectors a bad idea. It makes “Authentication” the screen you read rather than click past, which is exactly the screen a two-minute recipe omits.

“Native” is the wrong word, and the wrongness is useful

The caption says “375+ native MCP connectors” and then tells you to paste a URL. Those two things cannot both be true: the official term for the thing you add by pasting a URL is a custom connector, and if it were native there would be nothing to paste.

The distinction is not pedantry. A native connector is one Anthropic ships; a custom one points Claude at a server somebody else runs. The support article draws the line exactly where the risk changes — “services that haven’t been verified by Anthropic” — and there is a visual wrinkle worth knowing: a custom connector whose URL matches a Connectors Directory listing shows that service’s name and branding instead of a “Custom” label. It looks official. It is still something you added by hand.

And step three has nothing to do it with

Step three reads: “Paste the MCP URL from any connector below.” Below is the card. The card is thirty-three logos and thirty-three one-line descriptions.

Where does 375+ come from?

We went looking for an official count and could not find a current one. Anthropic’s own published figure, in April 2026, was “over 200”. Third-party snapshots from May and June 2026 put the directory at 350, 414 and 439 depending on who was counting and when.

So 375+ is plausible and unofficial — it sits inside the range of community counts and well above Anthropic’s last published number. The honest version is that the directory grows faster than anyone’s figure, which is also why a specific number on a card has a short shelf life. If the count matters to you, open the directory.

What the card gets right

Three things, and the first is the best line in this whole exercise. The footer:

“A list of ideas, not a ranking or advice. Tools, features and pricing change often. Check each tool’s official site, terms and data policy before you connect it to your accounts.”

That is precisely the right warning for a card about authorising third-party servers, and it is better advice than the caption above it. “Before you connect it to your accounts” is doing the work that steps five, six and seven do in the documentation.

Second, the card never actually claims these are MCP connectors. The columns are My Stack, For Marketing, For Sales. As a shopping list it is specific and opinionated, and the one-liners are the useful part: “Hotjar — watch where they bounce” tells you more than a feature list would.

Third, and quietly the most interesting thing on it: the six suggested stacks all begin in the same place.

That pattern is the actual thesis of the card, and it is never stated: the tools are interchangeable, the thing in front of them is not. Which also raises the question the caption glosses over — a connector added on claude.ai is not automatically available to Claude Code, and the two surfaces configure MCP servers in different places. If your stack runs from Claude Code, the Connectors screen is not the only place you will be working.

Four honest caveats

1. Menu names change, and ours could be the stale one. We quote the current support article; a different plan or a staged rollout can show different labels. If your screen says Integrations, your screen is right and the article will catch up.
2. We did not check all thirty-three tools for MCP servers. Several certainly publish one. Our point is narrower: the card does not say which do, and step three needs that information.
3. “375+” is unverified rather than wrong. We could not find an official current count in either direction, and the number is consistent with community tallies.
4. The security quotes are general, not about any tool on this card. They are Anthropic’s standing guidance for custom connectors, and they apply to every server you add by URL, including ones from companies you have heard of.

The one-line version

The recipe promises a connector in two minutes and lists five steps; the documented flow has eight, the three it drops are Authentication, OAuth client and Request headers, and the step that tells you to paste a URL points at a card that contains none.

Take the extra minute. The screen the shortcut skips is the one that decides what a stranger’s server may do with your account.