I let Anthropic's Claude Cowork loose on my files, and it was both brilliant and scary

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Agentic file management shows real productivity promise.
• Security, scale, and trust remain major open questions.
• At $100 per month, Cowork is for early adopters only.

"With great power comes great responsibility." So said wise old Uncle Ben to a young Peter Parker. With Claude Cowork, you're granting the AI enormous power, but the responsibility of what it does falls entirely on your shoulders.

Claude Cowork is basically agentic AI for your file system. Here's a view of its main screen.

You can see that Claude recommends six task categories (at 1). In this first hands-on article, we'll look at the Organize Files option and crunch some data. That will give us a good head start on what this new beastie can do ...