Claude Cowork — Anthropic’s Claude Code-style agent for general knowledge work — comes to your phone.
Claude Cowork was released as a desktop app in January, but will be available on web and mobile for Max subscribers starting Tuesday. This update allows users to start tasks from their desks, get status updates on their smartphones, and retrieve the finished output later, even when their laptops are closed.
This product expansion signals that Anthropic wants Cowork to feel more like an administrative colleague for agents than a coding tool for dummies. That is, something that can run in the background, do tagging across multiple devices, and request human input when faced with decisions that only the user can make.
In other words, the coding agent wars are spilling over into other parts of the office.
The move comes as AI companies seek to push their products beyond chatbots and into everyday surfaces where work actually happens. OpenAI is making a similar move for Codex. Although Codex began as a software development tool, it is increasingly being used by non-developers for reporting, spreadsheets, presentations, research, data analysis, and more.
For both labs, success will depend less on who has the best chatbot and more on who owns the space where the work is done.
The momentum extends to other apps as well. Anthropic recently launched Claude Tag, an always-on Claude that resides in Slack and acts as your AI teammate.
Beyond the benefits of one specific interface, launching Cowork as a multi-platform app means agents can continue to perform tasks in the background without having to bring the device online, the company says.
One example from Anthropic is: “Set client prep for Monday at 6 a.m. Claude goes through email threads, transcripts, and recent news, writes briefing documents, and leaves drafts of follow-up emails unsent. Reviews over coffee.”
The desktop app continues to be the place for detailed work, where Claude can access his local files and browser. But bringing Cowork to web and mobile means people who don’t have the app installed can also use it. Anthropic says Chat and Cowork will be integrated on the web and desktop from the start, with projects and artifacts coexisting on both.
Anthropic also announced initial data for Cowork. This suggests that the tool’s most obvious use case is in “work-arounds” to handle what Anthropic calls “tasks that are part of a broader job but are rarely an individual’s core responsibility” and keep companies functioning.
The study sampled 1.2 million anonymized and aggregated cowork sessions from more than 600,000 organizations during the last two weeks of May.
The largest category was business process operations at 33.4%. We consolidated disparate updates into a single report, created onboarding checklists, and adjusted spreadsheets. Anthropic said these tasks are common to finance, human resources and management roles.
The next most popular category at 16.4% was content creation and copywriting. This includes tasks such as drafting drafts, slide decks, social posts, proposals, and other communication duties, typically performed by marketing or management roles. In contrast, software development accounted for only 8.7% of Cowork usage.
“While coding remains, unsurprisingly, one of the hottest uses for AI, the use of AI in everyday business operations is on the rise, with a focus on the types of tasks for which people find AI most useful,” Anthropic said in a statement. “Our goal is to make this a reference point for people thinking about how to integrate AI products into their daily work, showing them where the most value is concentrated.”
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