Claude Desktop v2.31226.0 shipped on October 8, and the news of the day sits in the section for third-party deployments: a configuration key called desktopHome for Unified Claude, the beta that combines Chat and Cowork into one experience. With Cowork’s agentic capabilities in both.
Three states, and one of them you get by doing nothing
desktopHome takes two values and an omission:
standardturns Unified Claude on.offturns Chat and Cowork off entirely. Code is not affected.- Leaving it out keeps today’s Chat and Cowork split, until November 10. Then Unified Claude goes on for all orgs.
While the key is set, chatTabEnabled, chatAdvancedFileAnalysisEnabled and coworkTabEnabled have no effect. And Anthropic documents the trap right next to it: a value the app does not recognize, such as Standard with a capital S, reads as off. A typo doesn’t turn the feature on. It turns both surfaces off.
The Setup window gets two switches for this under “Allowed surfaces.” While the key is set, “Allow Chat,” “Allow Cowork” and “Advanced file analysis” are hidden, with their values kept. The two retention periods collapse into one.
This is the next step, not the first
The merge was announced on September 16 and has been rolling out gradually to Pro and Max since. What’s new is the organizational half of it: one switch, one date, and the question of who flips it early.
The plumbing is already moving underneath. Since October 8, the Compliance API chat endpoints also return chats from the unified experience, with your existing Compliance Access Key, in beta for Enterprise organizations. So anyone running chat exports for audits gets more material back than before, without doing anything.
What the import carries over
The same release widens claudeAiImport.automatic3pImport. When a computer moves into a new organization, it now brings Cowork artifacts, projects, memory and global instructions, scheduled tasks from Cowork and Code, uploaded plugins, saved skills, and the optional plugins a user had switched on from the organization’s directory.
Memory and global instructions take effect at once. Scheduled tasks, plugins and skills arrive on or off as they were. Only a brought-over project’s instructions wait for the user to accept them.
A deadline one month out
November 10 is what matters in this release note. Until then Unified Claude is a decision. After that it is the default. Admins who want it early need a key; admins who don’t want it have until then to say so.
For everyone else it’s a reminder of how fast this rebuild is moving. Three weeks ago the merge was an announcement for Pro and Max. Now it sits in the enterprise configuration with a date on it. In four weeks, “Chat or Cowork?” stops being a question.