Strava has, over several years, become increasingly protective of how its users use the data collected by the platform. It’s now quite hard for any third party app, or rider looking ot use a third party app, to easily use data collected by Strava. Unless, as of June 1, you’re planning to consult Claude.

Claude is, of course, Anthropic’s massive AI platform. After Strava trialed its own AI interface within the app, with, uh, limited success. Now the social training platform is turning to the big guns to satisfy user’s AI demands.

User driven?

What exactly is new? Strava’s new “Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector lets subscribers query their own Strava data through Claude and get in-depth insights about their training.” The optional connector is available to subscribers only. It’s started rolling out, so it could already be available in your area.

Strava claims this new partnership is driven by user demand. That could very well be true.

“Athletes have been telling us, in increasingly creative ways, that they want more ways to analyze their own training data,” said Ryan Dixon, VP, Partnerships & Developer Relations at Strava. “They’ve been doing it with spreadsheets, exports, and third-party scripts for years. The MCP connector gives them a far more efficient, safer tool while keeping the athlete in control, representing a step-change in our subscription offering.”

Strava users gain ease of AI assistance

As Dixon hints at, using any AI to do whatever you want to do with your Strava history, whether that’s develop a training program or asses what training is working or, well, pretty much anything, was quite labour intensive. Basically, you had to slowly export your data from Strava, then upload it you the LLM of your choice. And then do all of this again the next time you wanted to ask another question.

“The new MCP makes that process much easier by providing a seamless, secure experience connecting Claude to a breadth of activity data, including: access to full stream data – per second heart rate and apce, GPS data for geographic analysis of activities, power data for cycling, and access to your club and event data.” And probably some other things, depending what questions you want answered.

Strava: API vs AI

This Claude MCP is a significant swing away from a recent push to “protect users data.” For those of us around Strava for long enough, will remember that the platform was initially quite open. In recent years, the social fitness platform slowly made it more and more difficult for third party applications and platforms to access and use data, and for Strava users to take their data to another platform in an at all streamlined way. That escalated when Strava overhauled it’s application programming interface (API) back in 2024. The update made it much more difficult for any third party app to work off of Strava data, even when users sought to do so.

It’s the last part that makes Strava’s partnership with Claude a little surprising. This is not quite a swing back towards the initial era of openess. It’s more of a walled openess, where only Claude is granted access. For now, at least. In the FAQ section of this announcement, Strava says “We’re launching with Anthropic (Claude) and looking to support other AI clients in the future.”

What will Claude have access to?

If you’re interested, but wondering about privacy, here’s Strava’s word on how Claude’s access is limited.

“The Strava MCP is built by Strava and was designed with security and quality guardrails. As always, your data stays yours. The MCP connector provides read-only access, scoped to your account, and is revocable anytime from Strava settings”

There’s more information includided in Strava’s guide for how to connect the the Claude MCP.

Again, all of this is optional. So if you don’t want Claude looking at your data. It’s also only available to subscribers. So Claude won’t automatically be watching and learning from all Strava data, at least not via this MCP. Strava does have its own AI features, though. There’s a way to turn those off, but you’ll have to dig for that yourself.