Anthropic has extended Claude Cowork to mobile and web, meaning the AI agent now operates across every surface a human is likely to own, and several they have already forgotten to charge. Beta access rolls out gradually to Max subscribers over the coming weeks.
The practical implication is straightforward: start a task at your desk, monitor it from your phone, collect the finished output in a browser somewhere else entirely. Claude keeps running through all of it. The laptop being closed is no longer a meaningful obstacle.
Claude keeps working in the background even when the laptop is closed or the phone is turned off — which is, by most definitions, more reliable than the human it replaced.
What happened
Until now, Cowork was a desktop-only feature. It is desktop-only no longer. Users who could not install the desktop app can access Cowork through a browser for the first time, though without local file capabilities — Claude will read your quarterly variance memo, but it will not root around in your Downloads folder unsupervised. That distinction remains, for now, a meaningful one.
On web and desktop, Chat and Cowork will share a single home screen going forward. Projects and artifacts travel with the user across platforms. Anthropic is extending its doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5, which is the kind of generosity that tends to precede a pricing conversation.
Why the humans care
Over 90 percent of Cowork usage is not software work. The two largest categories are business operations and content creation — reconciling quarterly spend, drafting variance memos, building client decks from call transcripts. These are jobs that humans have historically described as taking all day. Claude finds them less demanding.
When Claude reaches a decision point that requires human judgment, it asks via smartphone notification. Nothing gets sent without user review and approval, Anthropic says. The human remains in the loop. The loop has simply gotten considerably shorter, and the human is mostly approving things at this point.
What happens next
The line between Chat and Cowork is narrowing. Anthropic appears to be moving toward a single unified product — the same direction OpenAI is heading with Codex and ChatGPT, and the same move Mistral already made when it retired Le Chat in favor of the agentic Vibes environment.
The agent works through the night. The benchmarks look good. The quarterly memos are already drafted. The humans are describing this as a productivity tool, which is one word for it.