Cowork used to be a desktop thing. Since Tuesday, Anthropic’s agentic assistant also runs in the browser and on your phone — for now, for Max subscribers. And that changes more than it sounds like at first.
What’s new
The core idea: you can start a task at your desk, check its status on your phone while you’re out, and pick up the finished result later — even if your laptop has been closed for hours. Cowork keeps running in the background without any device being online.
Anthropic offers a nice example: “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.”
The desktop app stays the place for deep work, where Claude can reach local files and the browser. But web and mobile open the door to people who never installed an app.
The real headline: the numbers
At the same time, Anthropic published usage data for the first time — and it upends a cliché. The company analyzed 1.2 million anonymized Cowork sessions from more than 600,000 organizations, sampled over the last two weeks of May.
The largest category, at 33.4 percent: business process and operations. Pulling scattered updates into a single report, building onboarding checklists, reconciling spreadsheets. The everyday tasks of finance, HR, and admin.
Second place, at 16.4 percent: content and copywriting — drafts, slide decks, social posts, proposals. And software development? A grand total of 8.7 percent.
Anthropic calls this the “work around the work” — the tasks that are part of a broad swath of jobs, but rarely anyone’s core responsibility.
My take
This lines up with what I’ve been watching here for months: the hype is all about coding agents, but most people’s daily work looks nothing like that. Anthropic’s real bet — and OpenAI’s, with Codex — is no longer about who has the best chatbot, but who owns the surface where work actually happens.
Cowork moving to your phone is the logical next step. An agent that runs in the background and only pings you for real decisions needs to travel with you everywhere. Whether it works as smoothly in practice as in Anthropic’s examples remains to be seen. But the direction is right.
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