Anthropic’s Claude Cowork Lands On Web And Mobile For Max Users

Anthropic expanded its assistant app beyond desktop, letting subscribers start tasks at a workstation and continue them on a phone or browser while the system keeps working in the background.

Anthropic introduced Claude Cowork as a desktop-only application in January. Beginning Tuesday the company made the service available via web and native mobile for customers on its Max tier, enabling users to kick off a project on a laptop, monitor progress from a handset and retrieve the finished deliverable later even if their computer is shut. The firm says the update allows the agent to keep executing workflows without a device constantly online.

The upgrade reflects Anthropic’s effort to position Cowork as more of a hands-on administrative helper than a stripped-down coding utility. With cross-device persistence and the ability to pause for human decisions, the tool is meant to tag along with a worker’s routine and handle routine administrative chores. One company example reimagined by Anthropic describes scheduling an early-morning briefing: the agent combs through relevant messages and recent coverage, assembles a concise brief and prepares a reply email for the user to approve over coffee.

The shift follows a broader industry trend to move AI beyond chatboxes and into the everyday apps people use for work. Rival projects that began as developer aids have been packaged for broader office tasks such as reports, spreadsheets and presentations. Anthropic has also broadened its footprint with an always-on Claude integration for Slack, which acts as a persistent teammate inside messaging platforms.

Anthropic will keep the desktop client as the primary hub for intensive projects that need access to local files and the web, but web and mobile availability opens Cowork to employees who didn’t install the desktop app. The company said it will combine chat and the Cowork experience on web and desktop initially, so projects and generated files are accessible across devices.

Anthropic released early usage figures drawn from 1.2 million anonymized Cowork sessions across roughly 600,000 organizations during the final two weeks of May. The biggest share of activity — roughly one-third — involved business-process type jobs: consolidating scattered status updates into reports, preparing new-hire checklists and reconciling financial tables, commonly handled by finance, HR and administrative staff. About one-sixth of sessions were for content work such as drafting communications, slide decks and proposals. Tasks tied to software development made up under one-tenth of use.

A workplace technology analyst said the data shows these agents are increasingly being used for the "little but necessary" chores that keep offices running, not just code generation. "If firms want these assistants to stick, they’ll need to live where people already do their work and make it easy to hand off decisions," the analyst added. Anthropic framed Cowork as a tool for blending automated groundwork with human oversight — but the expansion also raises questions for companies around privacy, background processing and how always-on assistants will be governed.