Anthropic has introduced Cowork, a research-preview feature aimed at extending Claude Code’s capabilities beyond programming to everyday enterprise workflows.
The new flavor of the coding assistant will enable users to automate tasks such as summarizing calendars, creating reports, and organizing files, once an organization provides it access to a particular folder. Cowork can also connect to relevant tools, databases, and applications.
It can even be paired with Claude in Chrome to complete tasks that require browser access, the company wrote in a blog post, adding that users can assign tasks in parallel without waiting for the AI-based assistant to finish a particular task.
Useful for a wider range of functions
The introduction of Cowork, according to analysts, signals Anthropic’s push to make AI assistants useful for a wider range of business functions.
“Cowork reflects an intent to make Claude materially useful in everyday enterprise workflows by moving beyond conversation to scoped action, particularly around document and file-centric work that dominates knowledge roles,” said Vershita Srivastava, practice director at Everest Group.
Roles such as research, project management office (PMO), operations, and analytics, where guardrails can be clearly defined, can also reap benefits from the new tool and will probably see the most uptake, Srivastava added.
Seconding Srivastava, The Futurum Group’s practice leader for data, AI, and infrastructure, Bradley Shimmin pointed out that Cowork could be useful for developers as well and can be seen as a natural evolution of Anthropic’s “computer-use” capability and command-line utilities.
Since Cowork can access core operating system functionality, rather than just using a browser to look at your computer system and take pictures of your screen, it can be used to automate and operationalize tasks that sit adjacent to the agentic software development workflows, Shimmin said.
“For example, you may want to take some JSON data that is part of a project and quickly convert it into a markdown format so that non-developers can easily read that information.”
However, Anthropic has warned that giving Cowork access to a system or environment requires caution, as it can misunderstand prompts and end up executing “destructive” commands, such as deleting files, although it does ask users before executing a command or task.
The company also flagged the risk of prompt injection attacks, where malicious content could alter Claude’s plans despite the tool’s built-in defenses.
To counter such issues, Anthropic could build in an undo feature allowing users to retrieve files when deleted or un-send an email when the product is made generally available, said Jason Andersen, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.
The undo feature would take care of both prompt injection attacks as well as human error, Andersen added. Currently, the new flavor of the assistant is available to Claude Max subscribers via the macOS application.