Anthropic has expanded Claude Cowork, its agent for general knowledge work, from the desktop to web and mobile. The rollout is in beta and starts with Max subscribers, building on the desktop app that launched in January. The company is positioning Cowork less as a coding tool and more as an administrative coworker that works in the background and only pings a user when a decision needs human input, handling what Anthropic describes as the “work around the work.”<\/p>\n
The core pitch: a task started at a desk can keep running while the laptop is closed, with status updates appearing on a phone and the finished output ready to pick up later. The desktop app remains the home for deep work that needs access to local files and the browser, while the web and mobile versions widen the door to users who never installed it.<\/p>\n
A feature called Dispatch keeps a single persistent thread for each request and routes it to the appropriate engine. Development tasks go to Claude Code, while general knowledge work goes to Cowork. Claude returns the final result rather than narrating every intermediate step.<\/p>\n
Alongside the expansion, Anthropic released early usage data drawn from a sample of 1.2 million anonymised sessions across more than 600,000 organisations during the last two weeks of May. The largest share, 33.4 percent, was business process work such as reconciling spreadsheets and building reports, common in finance, HR, and administration. Content creation and copywriting accounted for 16.4 percent. Software development made up just 8.7 percent of sessions, a figure Anthropic cites as evidence that everyday business tasks, not coding, are where the product is landing hardest.<\/p>\n
The expansion fits a wider industry move away from standalone chatbots and toward the surfaces where tasks actually get done. OpenAI is taking a parallel approach with Codex, broadening its coding tool into a general enterprise platform for non-developers. Startups are also entering the field, including Viktor, which raised $75 million to embed an AI coworker inside Slack and Teams.<\/p>\n
Anthropic has been pushing Claude deeper into office software for several months, including integration with Microsoft Word and large enterprise deployments such as one at KPMG covering 276,000 staff. Google is pressing the same front with its Gemini Spark agentic assistant.<\/p>\n
Giving a phone remote control of a desktop agent carries real risk. A manipulated instruction or a phishing link could trigger hard-to-reverse actions on the connected machine. Anthropic’s own guidance urges users to connect these agents only if they trust every app in the chain, a caution that becomes more relevant as autonomous helpers spread through the office.<\/p>\n
Claude Cowork is Anthropic’s agent for general knowledge work. It launched as a desktop app in January and is now expanding to web and mobile in beta for Max subscribers.<\/p>\n
Dispatch keeps a single persistent thread for each request. Development tasks are routed to Claude Code, while general knowledge work goes to Cowork, and Claude returns the final result rather than narrating every intermediate step.<\/p>\n
Across a sample of 1.2 million anonymised sessions from more than 600,000 organisations in the last two weeks of May, 33.4 percent was business process work, 16.4 percent was content creation and copywriting, and just 8.7 percent was software development.<\/p>\n