Anthropic PBC today announced it’s bringing its Claude Cowork agentic artificial intelligence assistant to mobile and the web, breaking it free from the desktop.

Cowork allows users to harness the company’s most powerful AI models to do work across files, calendar, email, messaging apps, the web and other tools on their personal computer. It was originally released to provide the technical power of Claude Code, the company’s AI agent aimed at software engineers for development work, but packaged for everyday users.

Before today, users needed to have Cowork open on their desktop with the app window churning away. If they walked away from their computer or laptop screen, they would lose access to it and wouldn’t be able to keep track of its progress.

With this update, users can start on their desktop and continue on mobile or the web, so they can keep going even when they’re not at their keyboard.

Starting with Max users in beta mode, the $100- to $200-a-month subscription plan for Anthropic’s AI tools, users can now start a task on their laptop, let Claude begin its work, and walk away. If it runs into an ambiguity, can’t access a tool without permission or needs to make a decision that requires human input, users can now control it via the web or mobile.

Scheduled tasks will now run without the need for a computer to be online to activate them. This means that users can set up a 6 a.m. client prep for Monday morning to start before they get to the office. By the time they sit down and boot up the computer in their office, Cowork has already crunched a meeting briefing doc, prepared follow-up emails and scanned research that might come in handy for the week.

How are people using Cowork?

Alongside the beta launch of Cowork on mobile and web, Anthropic also released a report outlining how people use the tool.

Anthropic released Cowork in January 2026 and in May, the company surveyed 1.2 million anonymized sessions, categorizing them across a number of types of work. The company said almost half of all Cowork usage came from professionals simplifying operations and creating content.

The largest category turned out to be “business process and operations” – that is, anything that might be considered a type of knowledge work that requires looking through scattered documents and compiling them into a single report or handling tedious data comparison tasks. This category represented 33.4% of all usage.

The second-largest category was content creation and copywriting — anything that required synthesizing communications, producing drafts, slide decks or other document work. This category measured in at 16.4% of all usage. According to the company, users from numerous enterprise roles used the tool in their everyday work, including marketing, communications, business development and project management.

The remaining top categories included software development at 8.7%, DevOps and cloud infrastructure codification and configuration at 7%, research and intelligence at 6.4%, document processing and extraction at 4.1%, and sales revenue operations at 4%.

Unlike ordinary chatbots, which can also work over massive sets of documents to provide answers to questions, Cowork is similar to having an electronic intern sit down and work out an entire project. Chatbots operate on the idea that quick answers to questions now are helpful; Cowork takes questions and turns them into short- or long-term tasks that can run in parallel to everyday work.

According to Anthropic, people appear to be using Cowork to assemble and structure information in ways that help them digest it more effectively. They’re asking the tool to process larger volumes of data and documents, extract insights and organize them so they can more easily find what they need to understand the breadth of available knowledge and act on it.

For example, a lawyer might use Cowork to handle document formatting and preparation, giving them more time to strategize based on the information contained in the case. A team lead might use the tool to produce a slide deck that breaks down timelines, cost ratios and other metrics they need to look at, presenting it alongside feedback from employees and clients to better understand the health of a project before making a decision or presenting an update to management.

The company added that Cowork usage showed a contrast to Claude Code, which is most often used by software developers as part of the process of producing, debugging and shipping code. Coding work has dominated the headlines regarding the use of AI agents.

In fact, it’s common for the development community to jump immediately to new models and aim them at codebases to test how they’ll work. How well an agent codes is an easy way to review its capability, but how well an agent builds a report, catches up on meeting notes or drafts emails doesn’t catch as much attention.

Documentation, content creation and knowledge work are also everything that isn’t code, or as the industry would call it, “the connective tissue” that surrounds work, including the work done by software engineers.

Image: Anthropic