Claude Cowork

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agentic AI assistant for knowledge workers — designed as the counterpart of Claude Code for non-technical users, with a graphical interface instead of a terminal. It launched in January 2026 as a research preview, reached general availability for enterprise customers in April 2026, and in July 2026 Anthropic extended Cowork to the browser and mobile apps (beta).

Unlike traditional chat, Cowork carries out whole tasks: it reads files from a selected folder and from connected services, performs multi-step operations, runs commands in a sandboxed shell, opens the browser, fills forms and saves the result as a file ready to open or share. Example tasks: a weekly marketing deck, a pre-meeting sales brief, organizing a folder of documents for a legal audit.

Key product capabilities include Scheduled tasks (the agent works even when you close your laptop), Parallel task execution (the agent splits big projects into tracks running simultaneously), Folder-scoped access (explicit scope selection with approvals for destructive operations), and Plugins bundling skills, connectors and sub-agents into ready-made role-specific packages.

Cowork integrates with major services: Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Slack, Linear, Notion, Salesforce, HubSpot, Airtable, Asana, ServiceNow, Zapier, and DocuSign and FactSet (enterprise). It supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) and lets Enterprise administrators build private plugin marketplaces.

For security, Cowork offers a plan-and-approve mode before significant actions, tamper-evident audit logs, SIEM integration via OpenTelemetry, permission controls per team and department, and the option to run in the customer's own environment — Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud or Microsoft Foundry. The government variant (Claude for Government) runs in a FedRAMP High environment.

The browser and mobile versions, launched on July 7, 2026, move agentic execution loops to the cloud, letting tasks continue while a local device is offline. A task started on a phone can be finished on a desktop and vice versa.