Claude Cowork – Anthropic’s Claude Code-style general knowledge work agent – comes to your phone.
Claude Cowork was launched as a desktop app in January, but it will be available on the web and mobile for Max subscribers starting Tuesday. The update allows users to start work at their desk, receive status updates on their phone, and check the completed printout later. This is possible even when the laptop is closed.
The product expansion is a sign that Cowork wants to feel more like an agent management companion than a coding tool for dummies. That means it can work in the background, tag across multiple devices, and ask for human input when decisions pop up that only you can make.
In other words, the coding agent wars are spreading throughout the office.
The move comes as AI companies seek to expand their products beyond chatbots and into everyday surfaces where work actually happens. OpenAI has made a similar move as Codex, which started out as a software development tool but is increasingly being used by non-developers for reports, spreadsheets, presentations, research, data analysis, and more.
The success of both labs is expected to be determined by who owns the space where the work is done rather than who has the best chatbot.
This push extends to other apps as well. Anthropic recently launched Claude Tag, an always-on Claude who lives in Slack and acts as an AI team member.
Beyond the benefits of one specific interface, launching Cowork as a multi-platform app means agents can continue to run tasks in the background without needing an online device, the company says.
Here’s an example from Anthropic: “I set client prep for Monday at 6am. Claude works through email threads, history and recent news, writes briefing documents and drafts follow-up emails but leaves them unsent. We review them over coffee.”
The desktop app will remain Claude’s place for deeper work, with access to local files and browsers. But launching Cowork on web and mobile means that even people who don’t have the app installed can use Cowork. Anthropic says Chat and Cowork are launching with integration on the web and desktop, so projects and artifacts will live together on both.
Anthropic also released early Cowork data, which suggests that the clearest use case for the tool is what Anthropic calls “work-peripheral work,” which keeps the company functioning while handling “tasks that are part of a broader job but are not an individual’s core responsibility.”
The study sampled 1.2 million anonymously aggregated Cowork sessions from more than 600,000 organizations during the last two weeks of May.
The largest category, at 33.4%, was business process operations. Pulled scattered updates into a single report, created onboarding checklists, and coordinated spreadsheets. Anthropic said this task is common between finance, HR and management roles.
The next largest category at 16.4% was content writing and copywriting. This means that tasks like drafts, slide decks, social posts, proposals, and other communication tasks are typically performed in marketing and management positions. By comparison, software development accounted for only 8.7% of Cowork usage.
“While coding remains one of the most interesting uses for AI, the use of AI for everyday business tasks is increasing and is focused on the kinds of tasks people find most useful,” Anthropic said in a blog post. “Our goal is to provide people who are figuring out how to integrate AI products into their daily work as a reference point and show where the value is most concentrated.”
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