Claude Code’s success prompted Anthropic to launch Claude Cowork. Two weeks later, it's shipping a major upgrade.

On Friday, Anthropic added support for plug-ins in Cowork. These plug-ins make it simple to activate instructions for Claude to get the finished product you want from using Cowork, which is particularly helpful in tackling specific tasks.

“A plug-in is the combination of all of the tools you need, all of the kind of workflows or kind of tasks that you're doing frequently, all of these skills and the knowledge that you need to be able to do those things,” said Matt Piccolella, who works on product at Anthropic, to The Deep View.

These plug-ins don’t replace previously-launched customization tools, such as MCPs, interactive apps, agent skills. Rather, Piccolella said that plug-ins bundle all of these context commands together, making it easier to run repeated workflows.

With the launch, the company is open-sourcing 11 pre-built plug-ins which make it easy for people to just grab and go for their own use cases, including plug-ins for productivity, sales, finance, data, customer support and biology research. The full collection is available on GitHub, as well as the ability for users to create their own plug-ins

Even with the pre-built plug-ins, Piccolella called the initial set a “reference implementation,” and recommends treating them as shirts off the rack that can be tailored to better fit you — with Claude being the tailor.

The new experience is available starting today in Cowork as a research preview for all paid Claude users. Plug-ins are currently saved locally, but organization-wide sharing and management are coming in the weeks ahead. While currently limited to paid users, Piccolella said that the goal is to make it accessible to all users.