Claude Cowork — Anthropic’s Claude Code agent for general knowledge work — comes to your phone.
Claude Cowork launched as a desktop app in January, but as of Tuesday it’s available on the web and mobile for Max subscribers. With the update, users can start a task from their desk, receive status updates on their phone, and get the final output later — even if their laptop is turned off.
The product expansion is a signal that Anthropic wants Cowork to feel less like a coding tool for dummies and more like an admin agency: something that can run in the background, tag all devices, and ask for human input when a decision comes up that only the user can make.
In other words: The coding agent wars spill over into the rest of the office.
The move comes as AI companies try to push their products beyond chatbots to the everyday surfaces where the work actually happens. OpenAI made it similar move to Codex, which started as a software development tool, but is increasingly used by non-developers for reporting, spreadsheets, presentations, research, data analysis and more.
For both labs, the bet is that success will depend less on who has the best chatbot and more on who owns the space where the work is done.
This push extends to other applications as well. Anthropic recently launched Claude Tag, an always-on Claude that lives in Slack and acts as an AI teammate.
Beyond the benefits of a specific interface, Cowork’s launch as a cross-platform app means the agent can continue to perform tasks in the background without an online device, the company says.
An example from Anthropic says: “Here’s Monday’s client prep for 6am: Claude works through email threads, transcripts and breaking news, creates the update document, and leaves the next email drafted but not sent. Check it out over coffee.”
The desktop app will remain the place for deep work, where Claude can access local files and the browser. However, bringing Cowork to web and mobile means that people who don’t have the app installed can also use it. Anthropic says that chat and Cowork will be unified across web and desktop to begin with, with projects and objects living together across both.
Anthropic also released early Cowork data, which suggests the tool’s clearest use case is “work around work” that keeps companies running by handling what Anthropic calls “tasks that are part of a broad range of jobs, but are rarely a single person’s core responsibility.”
The study sampled 1.2 million anonymous and aggregated Cowork sessions from more than 600,000 organizations in the last two weeks of May.
The largest category at 33.4% was business process functionality: pulling disparate updates into a single report, creating integration checklists, and harmonizing spreadsheets. Anthropic said the duties are shared between roles in finance, human resources and administration.
The next largest category at 16.4% was content creation and copywriting: tasks such as drafts, slide decks, social posts, proposals and other communication tasks typically performed by marketing and management positions. Software development, by comparison, accounted for only 8.7% of Cowork usage.
“While coding is still — understandably — one of the uses of AI that gets the most attention, the use of AI for everyday business work is on the rise, and the kinds of tasks people find it most useful for are coming into focus,” Anthropic said in a statement. “Our goal is to make this a benchmark for people figuring out how to integrate AI products into their daily work and show where the most value is concentrated.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
