Anthropic's Claude Cowork AI agent is now available on mobile and web
Quick Answer
Anthropic has launched its Claude Cowork AI agent on mobile and web platforms, expanding access beyond the desktop app.
Quick Take
Anthropic has launched its Claude Cowork AI agent on mobile and web platforms, expanding access beyond the desktop app. Beta access starts with Max subscribers, allowing users to manage tasks seamlessly across devices, while maintaining a 'human in the loop' approach for critical decisions.
Key Points
- Beta access for Claude Cowork begins with Max subscribers over the coming weeks.
- Users can manage tasks from desktop, mobile, and web, with Claude operating in the background.
- Over 90% of Cowork usage focuses on business operations and content creation.
- The desktop app remains crucial for local file access and specific features.
- Anthropic plans to merge Chat and Cowork into a single product in the future.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readAnthropic is rolling out its AI agent Claude Cowork to mobile and web. Until now, the feature was only available through the desktop app.
Beta access will go live gradually over the coming weeks, starting with Max subscribers. With the expansion to mobile and web, users can kick off a task at their desk, check on it from their phone, and pull up the finished result in a browser anywhere. Claude keeps working in the background even when the laptop is closed or the phone is turned off.
The "human in the loop" goes mobile, too. When Claude hits a point where only a person can make the call, the agent asks via smartphone. Nothing gets sent without the user reviewing and approving it first, Anthropic says.
Anthropic says more than 90 percent of Cowork usage isn't software work. That shouldn't surprise anyone, since Cowork was always positioned as an agentic harness for general knowledge work, not coding. The two biggest categories are business operations and content creation, things like reconciling quarterly spend, drafting variance memos, or building client decks from call transcripts. According to Anthropic, those two categories make up roughly half of all usage.
Desktop still matters for local file access
The desktop app remains essential for features that tap into the local machine, according to Anthropic. That includes reading and writing files in connected folders, local connectors and plugins, browser control through Claude in Chrome, and Computer Use, where Claude clicks, types, and navigates directly on screen. Users who couldn't install the desktop app before can now try Cowork through a web browser for the first time, though without those local capabilities.
On web and desktop, Chat and Cowork will share a single home screen going forward. Projects and artifacts will be available across platforms. To mark the expansion, Anthropic is extending its doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5.
Apart from local file access, which the web version lacks, the lines between Chat and Cowork are getting harder to draw. Anthropic seems headed toward merging the two into a single product, much like OpenAI plans to do with Codex and ChatGPT. French AI company Mistral recently did exactly that, replacing its Le Chat chatbot with Vibes, its more capable agentic coding environment. ChatGPT and Claude are far bigger brand names, though, which makes that kind of move harder for both OpenAI and Anthropic.
— Originally published at the-decoder.com
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