Cowork for Claude can access a folder on your computer and organize its contents

Cowork is a new feature of the AI ​​chatbot Claude This clicks on a user’s computer folder to either modify it or create new projects using the data, Anthropic said in a blog post on Monday. Cowork is currently only available to MacOS users with a $100 per month Claude Max subscription.

Cowork works by having users give Claude access to the Computer folder. Once inside, users can then chat with Claude and ask him to organize all the files, rename items to conform to a specific naming convention, or read the files inside to create spreadsheets or other documents. For example, if a user has a folder with a bunch of receipts, Cowork can organize all the files and create a spreadsheet that lists all expenses.

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It also gave Anthropic Cowork the ability to link to Connectorswhich allows Claude to connect to other applications to create documents, presentations, or other projects. In addition, Cowork works with Claude in Chrome extension, allowing it to complete tasks that require browser access.

“The inspiration for Cowork was watching what people did with Claude Code,” Felix Risberg, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff, told CNET. “We built it for programming, but people started using it for everything — taxes, managing receipts, organizing files, managing random lives.” “Both developers and non-developers are starting to use the proxy ring to get some help from Cloud on their computers.”

Anthropic maintains that Claude cannot modify anything to which he has not been granted access. But since Cowork is still in the research preview phase, essentially a beta testing period, there is a possibility that the AI ​​could cause unintended consequences. The company recommends using Cowork only on non-sensitive items.

Anthropic also warns of potential injection attacks, where AI inadvertently absorbs commands from websites across the Internet and performs unintended actions. The company says it has built defenses against these possibilities. However, if an attacker uses a zero-day injection attack to take control of Claude, who can also access a folder on your computer containing sensitive information via Cowork, this could pose a major problem.

Cowork by Anthropic comes as more AI models gain agentic capabilities. This is the time when AI can do more than just chat with the user. Alternatively, these AI systems can go out to the Internet and perform tasks on the user’s behalf, e.g Travel reservationCompile a complex report or Order a pizza. Tools like ChatGPT Proxy and Gemini agent Tasks are already being fulfilled for users.

Companies are taking artificial intelligence a step further, as with Computer usage model Google Gemini 2.5. This enables the AI ​​to access the computer directly, allowing it to interact with and complete tasks. Agentic AI is also creeping into the retail space. Last week, Google and its retail partners announced… A new open standard for online shopping Which enables AI to work across multiple retailers and payment systems.