CloudCowork is expanding to mobile and web

Claude Cowork – Anthropic’s agent Claude Code for general knowledge works – coming to your phone.

Claude Cowork launched as a desktop app in January, but as of Tuesday it became 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 capture the final output later – even if their laptop is locked.

The product expansion is an indication that Anthropic wants Cowork to look less as a programming tool for dummies and more like an agentic administrative co-worker: something that can run in the background, tag across devices, and ask for human input when a decision pops up that only the user can make.

In other words: the programming agent wars spill over into the rest of the office.

The move comes as AI companies try to push their products beyond chatbots to everyday surfaces where work actually happens. OpenAI has A similar step with the Codex Alimentarius, Which started as a software development tool but is increasingly being used by non-developers for reports, spreadsheets, presentations, research, data analysis, and more.

For both testers, the bet is that success will depend less on who has the best chat software, and more on who owns the space in which the work gets done.

This push also extends to other applications. Anthropic recently launched Cloud Tagthe ever-present Claude who lives in Slack and works as an AI teammate.

In addition to the benefits of one specific interface, launching Cowork as a cross-platform app means an agent can continue to run tasks in the background without needing an internet-connected device, the company says.

One example from Anthropic reads: “Client onboarding Monday at 6 a.m.: Claude works through email threads, texts, and recent news, creates a summary document, and leaves the follow-up email drafted but unsent. Review it over coffee.”

The desktop app will still be the place for deep work, where Claude can access local files and the browser. But bringing Cowork to web and mobile means people who haven’t installed the app can use it, too. Anthropic says Chat and Cowork will be unified across web and desktop to start, with projects and items coexisting across both.

Anthropic also released early Cowork data, which suggests the tool’s clearest use case is “work around work” that keeps companies running, handling what Anthropic calls “tasks that are part of a broad range of jobs, but are rarely a person’s primary responsibility.”

The study sampled 1.2 million anonymized group work sessions collected from more than 600,000 organizations during the last two weeks of May.

The largest category at 33.4% was running business processes: pulling scattered updates into a single report, creating setup checklists, and reconciling spreadsheets. Anthropic said the tasks are shared across roles in finance, human resources and administration.

The next largest category at 16.4% was content creation and copywriting: tasks such as drafts, slide shows, social posts, proposals and other communications work typically performed by marketing and management positions. In comparison, software development accounts for only 8.7% of coworking usage.

“While programming is still — understandably — one of the uses of AI that gets the most attention, the use of AI in everyday business is on the rise, and the focus is on the types of tasks people find most useful for,” Anthropic said in a blog post. “Our goal is to make this a reference point for people figuring out how to integrate AI products into their daily work, and show where the value is most concentrated.”