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As a program WIRED reporter, I’ve experienced a lot of bad things Agents Over the past two years. These experiments reveal a consistent pattern of Generative artificial intelligence Startups overpromise and underdeliver when it comes to these “agents” assistants — programs designed to control your computer, perform household chores and digital tasks to free up your time for more important things. But the bots I installed on my laptop I will struggle To complete even basic tasks. They didn’t succeed.
This poor track record makes Anthropic’s newest agent, Claude CoworkA pleasant surprise. When I tested it by running it through some basic and intermediate demos suggested by the company as well as my own commands, it worked fairly well – especially for programming This is still in beta. It can do things like organize files into folders, convert file types, create reports, and even control the browser to search the web or sort your Gmail inbox. When it comes to file management and computer interfaces, this tool feels like the beginning of an interesting evolution of the user experience.
Last year, Anthropic nurtured a cult following Claude Code A popular tool among developers who loved its ability to understand code bases and run commands, tech employees all over San Francisco used it at work seemingly all the time. But most people are not members of the technical staff of some startup.
“We tried a bunch of different ideas to see what form factor would make sense for a less technical audience that didn’t want to use a terminal,” says Boris Cherny, head of Cloudcode at Anthropic. Over the past two months, Cherny has written all of his code using artificial intelligence. It was joint work Built using artificial intelligence tools.
Issued by Anthropic Earlier this week, as a research preview, Cowork takes the capabilities available in the company’s programming-focused tool and makes the user experience more intuitive. This tool is designed for a broader range of non-technical users, who may want to try a new way of controlling their computer but are intimidated by Command line.
Never
Rhys Rogers
Currently, Cowork is only available as part of a research preview to subscribers to the $100-per-month Anthropic plan, which is Co-release strategy For generative AI companies that roll out new features in a streamlined manner for early adopters.
Felix Risberg, a member of the technical staff at Anthropic who focuses on Cowork, says he uses it to submit expense reports and perform file transfers. “If that PDF is too big, make it smaller,” he says. “Convert these 20 JPGs into one PDF. And make me a report on all this stuff.” Rieseberg is excited about how to do this More advanced users They are already experimenting with complex apps, but they see the more straightforward, file-focused apps as “my favorite” uses for Search Preview.
This early release is limited to Claude on Macwith the possibility of rolling it out on a larger scale in the future. Although you can use it to interact with files on your computer, an Internet connection is required to run Cowork. The Cowork tab appears next to the Chat and Code tabs in the Claude app Mac. User sessions are classified as “tasks” instead of “conversations”.
What about security risks?
The biggest reason not to try Cowork is continuity protection The risks inherent in this type of factor. Like most clients, Cowork is vulnerable to spot injection attacks, which are secret hidden online messages that attempt to trick AI tools and divert them from tasks. You should not expose sensitive data to a tool that can be hacked in this way.
“Because Cloud can read, write, and permanently delete these files, be careful about granting access to sensitive information such as financial documents, credentials, or personal records,” the Anthropic report said. Online support page. He suggests creating a dedicated folder full of non-sensitive information you want Claude to have access to and saving backups of important files.