Anthropic Claude wants to be your helpful colleague, always looking over your shoulder

Anthropic on Monday announced the research preview of Claude Cowork, a tool for automating office work that comes with the now familiar recitation of machine learning risks.

The company said Cowork was inspired by Claude Code, its tool for generating programming code using natural language prompts and whatever files and tools have been made accessible.

With Claude Code, the output is generally source code or related artifacts like documentation or configuration files. With Cowork, the output may be local files like spreadsheets or interaction with desktop or web applications.

Cowork may find fans among knowledge workers who have to create presentations but take no pride in their work, who need to move data between applications without codified import and export rituals, or who have to conduct extensive reformatting operations in spreadsheets. 

It may also find favor as a crutch that allows people with minimal application skills to delegate activities beyond ...