What changed
Anthropic is merging Claude Cowork, its agentic product for longer tasks, with ordinary Claude chat into a single app, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday. “You don’t have to choose where a task goes,” the post says. Rollout has begun, starting with the Pro and Max plans on web, desktop and mobile over the coming weeks.
Anthropic said people who used both Cowork and its Claude Design tool found it frustrating to decide where a task belonged, and that work started in one did not carry over to the other. Claude now works out what a task needs, so Cowork’s and Design’s capabilities are available from any conversation, with the user’s existing context, skills and connectors. Anthropic says Claude can keep working on a task after the user has closed their laptop, and that progress can be checked from a phone.
Docs, Slides and Design
Alongside the merger, Anthropic introduced Claude Docs and Claude Slides. Users can ask for a document and write it together with Claude, or ask for a presentation and have Claude draft the slides. Both can be edited directly, presented from Claude, or downloaded as PowerPoint or PDF, and anything made with Docs, Slides or Design sits at a single shareable link.
Claude Design, which TechCrunch notes was introduced in April, now also works inside conversations. People who use Claude Design on its own can carry on as before. All three tools are in beta on paid plans, and Enterprise admins decide when to turn them on.
Fortune reported that Docs lets several colleagues work on a document in real time, and that exports to Google Docs and Microsoft Word are supported at launch. It also reported that Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding product, remains separate for now.
How much Claude does on its own
By default, Claude asks before taking an action, Anthropic said. Users who would rather let it keep working and check in only when something needs a closer look can switch that on. Tasks can also be scheduled to repeat, such as a weekly report.
Existing Cowork users keep their chats, projects, artifacts, connectors and skills. Chat users do not need to change anything, and there is no setting to turn on.
Who gets it, and when
Pro and Max subscribers, new and existing, are first. Team and Free plans will follow “soon”, according to Anthropic, which has given no date. Enterprise admins will be told at least 30 days before anything changes for their organisations.
Fortune placed the move within a wider push to build a single AI “superapp”, noting that OpenAI plans to fold ChatGPT and its Codex coding agent into one product. It also pointed out that agentic tasks tend to use far more tokens than simple chat, which could raise the compute cost of answering even basic questions.
What to watch
The Team and Free rollout, and the notice Enterprise customers receive, are the next steps. Anthropic has not said when Docs, Slides and Design will leave beta.
