Claude Cowork launches mobile and web apps

Claude Cowork — Anthropic’s Claude Code-style agent for general knowledge work — is now available on your phone.

Claude Cowork first launched as a desktop app in January, but starting Tuesday, it is also accessible on web and mobile for Max subscribers. With this update, users can start a task at their desk, receive status updates on their phone, and later retrieve the finished output — even if their laptop is closed.

This product expansion signals that Anthropic wants Cowork to feel less like a basic coding tool and more like an autonomous administrative assistant: something that operates in the background, follows you across devices, and asks for human input only when a decision requires the user’s judgment.

In other words, the coding agent wars are now spreading into the broader office environment.

This move comes as AI companies strive to extend their products beyond chatbots into the everyday workspaces where real tasks happen. OpenAI has made a similar shift with Codex, which started as a software development tool but is now increasingly used by non-developers for reports, spreadsheets, presentations, research, data analysis, and more.

For both companies, the bet is that success will hinge less on having the best chatbot and more on owning the platform where work gets done.

That push also extends to other applications. Anthropic recently launched Claude Tag, an always-on Claude that resides in Slack and functions as an AI teammate.

Beyond the advantages of any single interface, launching Cowork as a multi-platform app means the agent can continue running tasks in the background even without a device being online, the company says.

One example from Anthropic: “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.”

The desktop app will remain the go-to space 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 also use it. Anthropic says chat and Cowork will be unified in web and desktop initially, with projects and artifacts coexisting across both.

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

The study sampled 1.2 million anonymized and aggregated Cowork sessions from more than 600,000 organizations over the last two weeks of May.

The largest category, at 33.4%, was business process operating: pulling scattered updates into a single report, building onboarding checklists, and reconciling spreadsheets. Anthropic noted these tasks are common in finance, HR, and administration roles.

The next largest category, at 16.4%, was content creation and copywriting: tasks like drafts, slide decks, social posts, proposals, and other communications work typically performed by marketing and management positions. Software development, by comparison, accounted for only 8.7% of Cowork usage.

“While coding is still — understandably — one of the most highlighted uses of AI, the application of AI for everyday business work is on the rise, and the types of tasks people find most helpful are becoming clearer,” Anthropic said in a statement. “Our goal is to make this a reference point for those figuring out how to integrate AI products into their daily work, and to show where value is most concentrated.”