Claude Cowork
Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agentic desktop mode, available in the Claude desktop app, that lets Claude operate your computer — reading and writing files, running a sandboxed shell, driving apps, and connecting to your tools via MCP — instead of only chatting.
Claude Cowork turns Claude from a chat assistant into a digital colleague that can actually do work on your machine. Where a chatbot returns words, Cowork returns completed work: it can open your files, analyze data, draft documents in your format, operate desktop and web apps, and connect to services like Gmail, Slack, Google Drive, and your CRM through MCP integrations.
It is built for everyone, not just developers. Non-technical teams — marketing, recruiting, finance, legal, operations — use Cowork to automate the repetitive, multi-step knowledge work that fills their week. It uses a human-in-the-loop model, asking for approval before sensitive actions, and runs locally on your computer.
Cowork is distinct from Claude.ai (the browser chat), Claude Code (the developer-focused coding agent), and Claude Computer Use (the API capability). It is the general-purpose, do-the-work member of the family.