laude Code had already set the standard for AI-powered coding assistance. Now, Claude Cowork wants to become the standard for the rest of the workplace.

Anthropic’s latest app, released Monday as a research preview for Claude Max subscribers (the $100 to $200 per month tier), gives users an agentic assistant that handles tasks autonomously when given access to specific folders. Relying on the same agentic architecture that powers Claude Code, the product can handle complex tasks on users’ behalf, running locally on your device via Claude Desktop rather than requiring users to open a terminal. It's only on macOS for now.

Though still rough around the edges given that it’s in preview, Claude Cowork can do a lot. The agent can clean up your messy desktop, summarize unruly digital notes and create reports and spreadsheets from a growing stack of receipt screenshots.

Though many of these capabilities were already possible with Claude Code, Anthropic’s new product sends a clear message: it wants to be the go-to agentic tool for the entire workplace, not just developers. It underscores that Anthropic is keenly honed in on dominating the enterprise tech space by making itself as useful as possible.

Direct AI rivals, like OpenAI and xAI, have been seeking to cement their places in the enterprise workflow, with OpenAI hiring a new head of AI strategy and adoption to boost its enterprise endeavours last week, and xAI launching Grok Business and Enterprise plans in December. Traditional enterprise tech firms, meanwhile, have been trying to figure out where AI fits in, such as Slack releasing its own agentic AI upgrade on Tuesday.

And though Claude Cowork is still in its early days, having reportedly been developed in just a week and a half after being prototyped before the winter holidays, Anthropic’s enterprise AI prowess could spell trouble for competitors in the space.

Tools like Claude Cowork “Are flipping the script a bit on where you're going to spend your time and do the work and get the outputs of your labor,” Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, told The Deep View.