Anthropic’s Claude Cowork — an agent-style tool for general knowledge work that launched as a desktop app in January — is now available on web and mobile for Max subscribers. With the update, users can begin tasks on a desktop, receive status updates on their phone, and later retrieve the finished output even if their laptop is closed; Anthropic says the agent can continue running tasks in the background across devices.
Positioning Cowork as an administrative coworker
The company is framing Cowork not merely as a simplified coding assistant but as an agentic administrative teammate: something that moves with users across devices, maintains progress in the background, and prompts human input only when a decision requires it. Anthropic provides an example use case: “Set Monday’s client prep for 6 am: Claude works through the email threads, transcripts, and recent news, builds the briefing doc, and leaves the follow-up email drafted but unsent. Review it over coffee.”
Desktop, web and mobile differences
Anthropic says the desktop app will remain the environment for deeper work because it allows Claude to access local files and the browser. Bringing Cowork to web and mobile, however, opens usage to people who haven’t installed the desktop app. Chat and Cowork will be unified on web and desktop at launch, with projects and artifacts available across both interfaces.
Early usage data: what people are actually using Cowork for
Anthropic also released early Cowork usage data based on a sample of 1.2 million anonymized and 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 operating”: tasks such as consolidating scattered updates into a single report, building onboarding checklists, and reconciling spreadsheets. Anthropic says these tasks are common in finance, HR, and administration roles.
- The second-largest category, at 16.4%, was content creation and copywriting — drafts, slide decks, social posts, proposals and other communications work typically done by marketing and management roles.
- Software development accounted for only 8.7% of Cowork usage.
Anthropic commented that while coding remains a highly visible application of AI, the use of AI for everyday business work is growing and that the data helps show where value is most concentrated.
Industry context: competing for the workspace
The Cowork expansion is part of a broader push by AI companies to move beyond chatbots to the surfaces where actual work happens. OpenAI has made a similar shift with Codex, which began as a software development tool but is increasingly used by non-developers for reports, spreadsheets, presentations, research and data analysis. For both labs, the wager is less about having the best chatbot than about owning the environment in which work gets done.
Anthropic has also launched Claude Tag, an always-on Claude that lives in Slack and functions as an AI teammate.
Why this matters
Making Cowork available on web and mobile aims to make the agent a continuous, cross-device assistant for the routine administrative and communication tasks that keep companies running. Early usage metrics indicate the tool’s primary value so far lies in the "work around the work" — the widespread but often peripheral tasks that are crucial to day-to-day operations rather than the core job responsibilities of specific roles.
Conclusion
Anthropic’s move to multi-platform Cowork reflects its strategy to integrate AI into daily workflows across devices. The initial data suggests administrative and content tasks dominate usage, highlighting how such agents are extending beyond coding into the broader office.
