Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Code-like for general computing

Anthropic’s agentic tool Claude Code has been an enormous hit with some software developers and hobbyists, and now the company is bringing that modality to more general office work with a new feature called Cowork.

Built on the same foundations as Claude Code and baked into the macOS Claude desktop app, Cowork allows users to give Claude access to a specific folder on their computer and then give plain language instructions for tasks.

Anthropic gave examples like filling out an expense report from a folder full of receipt photos, writing reports based on a big stack of digital notes, or reorganizing a folder (or cleaning up your desktop) based on a prompt.

A lot of this was already possible with Claude Code, but it might not have been clear to all users that it could be used that way, and Claude Code required more technical know-how to set up ...