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| Image generated by AI |
Anthropic is bringing Claude Cowork to the web and mobile, allowing power users to start a task on their computer, check in from their phone, and come back to the completed work later, even with their laptop closed.
The AI startup announced that Claude Cowork will be available on web and mobile for its Max plan subscribers starting Tuesday, July 8. Launched as a desktop app in January, Cowork is an agent designed for autonomously handling general knowledge tasks. By bringing Cowork to web and mobile, users who previously could not install the desktop application can now use Cowork too. However, the desktop app will remain functional to let users give the AI agent access to local files and the browser for deep work.
Your AI Administrative Coworker
The expansion to mobile is part of a broader push by Anthropic to ensure that Claude is used less like a coding tool and more like an agentic administrative coworker. With this update, Cowork can work in the background, tag along across devices, and request human input when a decision pops up that only the user can make.
Chat and Cowork will be unified in web and desktop to start, with projects and artifacts living together across both platforms. This means that the agent can continue running scheduled tasks in the background without a device online.
One of the example prompts shared by Anthropic reads: “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.”
Beyond Coding: Everyday Business Tasks
The move comes as AI companies race to ship products beyond chatbots into everyday user-facing surfaces. Anthropic’s rival OpenAI has also been looking to upgrade and expand its AI-powered software development tool, Codex, for non-developers to use on reports, spreadsheets, presentations, research, and data analysis.
Alongside the announcement, Anthropic released Cowork usage data based on 1.2 million anonymised and aggregated sessions from over 600,000 organisations in late May. The data reveals that the tool is widely used for the "work around the work" that keeps companies functioning:
Business Process Operations: Over 33.4% of sessions were related to operations like pulling scattered updates into a single report, building onboarding checklists, and reconciling spreadsheets.
Content Creation: 16.4% of sessions involved content creation and copywriting, including drafts, slide decks, social posts, and proposals.
Software Development: Surprisingly, using Claude Cowork for software development tasks only accounted for 8.7% of total usage.
“While coding is still — understandably — one of the uses of AI that gets the most attention, the use of AI for everyday business work is on the rise,” Anthropic noted in a statement. “Our goal is to make this a reference point for people who are figuring out how to integrate AI products into their daily work, and to show where value is most concentrated.”