Anthropic is taking its AI agent Claude Cowork out of the desktop app and bringing it to iPhone, iPad, and the browser. Once started, a task will continue running even after the laptop is closed and packed away – and will notify the user on their phone as soon as a decision needs to be made. This transforms a local tool into a cross-device platform.
Cowork is Anthropic's agent for everyday knowledge work: You assign a task, and the system processes it across files, calendars, email, messaging apps, and the web until it's completed. Cowork launched in January 2026 as a desktop-only app. With today's update, the agent becomes cross-device. For Apple users, Anthropic's AI is no stranger: At WWDC 2026, Apple integrated the coding agents from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI directly into Xcode 27 and opened its Foundation Models frameworks to external models like Claude. Cowork operates independently of this, but follows the same trend from a different direction – AI agents are becoming increasingly integrated into everyday work.
Three innovations for everyday work
Anthropic highlights three points that change with the shift to mobile and web.
- Work moves with you: A task can be started at your desk, kept in view on your mobile phone while on the go, and later retrieved as a finished result from anywhere.
- Work continues in the background: Closing your laptop and going into a meeting no longer interrupts coworking – scheduled tasks now continue even when no device is online. Anthropic's own example is meeting preparation scheduled for Monday at 6 a.m.: The agent reviews email threads, transcripts, and current news, creates a briefing document, and saves the follow-up email as a finished but not yet sent draft.
- The decisions remain with the human: If the agent encounters a question that only the user can answer, it will notify the user – via their mobile phone. Nothing is sent or finalized before it has been reviewed and approved.
Why the mobile phone is just the remote control
One detail is easily overlooked in the initial brief reports, but it's crucial for understanding: On mobile devices and the web, Cowork doesn't execute tasks locally, but remotely on Anthropic's servers. The mobile device acts as a remote control, not a computing machine. Each session runs in an isolated, temporary environment that disappears after it ends and doesn't connect to the user's network.
As soon as a task requires local files or the browser, the agent accesses the computer via the desktop app – and only if the app is open, and only for the folders shared there. If the desktop app is offline, access to the computer remains blocked. For the actual in-depth work with local files, the desktop app thus remains the central location; mobile and web extend the reach, but do not replace it.
With scheduled background tasks comes increased responsibility. Because such runs cannot be monitored in real time, Anthropic explicitly advises starting with low-risk tasks like summaries and not setting up automations that handle sensitive files, send messages independently, or trigger actions that are difficult to reverse.
Starting as a beta via the Max plan
The service will launch as a beta with a phased rollout. The Max plan will be available first, with further subscription tiers to follow in the coming weeks. After the update, Cowork can be found in the sidebar of the Claude app on iPhone, iPad, and Android, as well as at claude.ai.
To coincide with the rollout, Anthropic is extending the previously doubled usage limits for Cowork until August 5th. At the same time, Chat and Cowork are being more closely integrated: On both web and desktop, they will now share a common start area – a sidebar, a search function, and a place for projects and artifacts.
What coworking is really used for
To coincide with the launch, Anthropic has published usage data that paints an insightful picture. This data is based on approximately 1.2 million anonymized coworking sessions from over 600,000 organizations, collected between May 11th and 31st.
By far the largest category, at 33.4 percent, is classic business processes: compiling scattered information into a report, creating onboarding checklists, and reconciling spreadsheets. This is followed by text and content work – drafts, presentations, and proposals – at 16.4 percent. Software development, long the flagship of agent-based AI, accounts for only 8.7 percent.
This aligns with the launch's strategic direction. Cowork and the recently introduced Slack agent Claude Tag demonstrate that Anthropic is deliberately moving its agents from the developer niche into everyday office work – to where, according to its own data, the majority of usage already takes place. Under the hood, this is powered by the recently released Claude Sonnet 5 model.
Agent AI leaves the terminal
With the move to mobile and web, Cowork becomes a tool that remains accessible throughout the day – started at your desk, continued in the background, and shared on the go. For Anthropic, this is less of a feature update and more of a repositioning: away from being a pure coding assistant and towards becoming an administrative assistant that handles the work surrounding the actual coding. How well this works in everyday use should become clear once the beta reaches a wider user base beyond the Max plan. (Image: Shutterstock / Stockinq)
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