Claude Cowork — Anthropic’s Claude Code-style agent for general knowledge work — is coming to your phone.
Claude Cowork launched as a desktop app in January, but starting Tuesday it is available on web and mobile for Max subscribers. With the update, users can start a task from their desk, get status updates on their phone, and pick up the finished output later — even if their laptop is closed.
The product expansion is a signal that Anthropic wants Cowork to feel less like a coding tool for dummies and more like an agentic administrative coworker: something that can work in the background, tag along across devices, and request human input when a decision pops up only the user can make.
In other words: The coding agent wars are spilling into the rest of the office.
The move comes as AI firms try to push their products beyond chatbots into the everyday surfaces where work actually happens. OpenAI has made a similar move with Codex, which began as a software development tool but is increasingly being used by non-developers for reports, 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 work gets done.
That push also extends to other apps. Anthropic recently launched Claude Tag, an always-on Claude that lives in Slack and acts as an AI teammate.
Beyond the benefits of one specific interface, launching Cowork as a multi-platform app means that the agent can continue running tasks in the background without a device online, the company says.
One example from Anthropic reads: “Set Monday’s client prep for 6 am: Claude works through the email threads, transcripts, and recent news, builds the briefing doc, and leaves the follow-up email drafted but unsent. Review it over coffee.”
The desktop app will remain the place for deep work, where Claude can access local files and the browser. But bringing Cowork to web and mobile means people who didn’t install the app can also use it. Anthropic says chat and Cowork will be unified in web and desktop to start, with projects and artifacts living together across both.
Anthropic also released early Cowork data, which suggests the clearest use case for the tool is the “work around the work” that keeps companies functioning, handling what Anthropic calls the “tasks that are part of a broad swath of jobs, but are rarely a person’s core responsibility.”
The study sampled 1.2 million anonymized and aggregated Cowork sessions from more than 600,000 organizations over the last two weeks of May.
The largest category at 33.4% was business process operating: pulling scattered updates into a single report, building onboarding checklists, and reconciling spreadsheets. Anthropic said the tasks are common among roles in finance, HR, and administration.
The next largest category at 16.4% was content creation and copywriting: tasks like drafts, slide decks, social posts, proposals, and other communications work that is usually performed by marketing and management positions. Software development, by comparison, only accounted for 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 are finding it most helpful for are coming into focus,” Anthropic said in a statement. “Our goal is to make this a reference point for people who are figuring out how to integrate AI products into their daily work, and to show where value is most concentrated.”
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