Claude Cowork Expands to Mobile and Web Today as New Anthropic Data Shows Most Sessions Aren't Coding

Anthropic's agentic productivity tool Claude Cowork is now available on mobile and web platforms, expanding beyond its original desktop-only format and allowing users to start tasks on one device before checking progress or receiving decisions on another, the company announced Tuesday.

Claude Cowork first launched as a desktop application in January, giving users a Claude Code-style agent designed for general knowledge work rather than software development specifically. Starting Tuesday, the tool is rolling out on web and mobile for subscribers on Anthropic's Max plan, with beta access expected to expand to additional plans over the coming weeks. According to Anthropic, sessions and files will now follow users across devices, meaning a task started at a desk can continue running in the background even after a laptop is closed, with status updates and any required decisions surfacing on a user's phone.

In a blog post announcing the update, Anthropic framed the shift as a fundamental change in how people interact with AI tools. "Everyone asks AI for answers. Handing it the work is different, and people keep giving Claude bigger jobs," the company wrote. "Work like that doesn't fit in one sitting. It accumulates overnight, between meetings, on the train. Until today, Cowork lived on your laptop, so the work stopped when you stepped away. Now it doesn't."

According to Anthropic, the update introduces three primary changes to how Cowork functions. Work now follows the user across devices, allowing a task to be started at a desk, checked from a phone, and picked up wherever the finished output is needed. Tasks also continue running in the background even when a device goes offline, meaning a user can close their laptop and head into a meeting while Claude continues working. Scheduled tasks can now run entirely without any device connected, with Anthropic offering an example in its announcement: setting a client preparation task for 6 a.m., during which Claude works through relevant email threads, transcripts and recent news, builds a briefing document, and leaves a follow-up email drafted but unsent for the user to review over coffee. Anthropic emphasized that significant decisions remain with the user, noting that when Claude reaches a decision point only a person can make, it sends the question directly to that person's phone.

The desktop version of Cowork will remain the primary environment for what Anthropic describes as deep work, given its ability to access local files and the browser directly. However, extending the tool to web and mobile means people who never installed the desktop application can now access Cowork as well. Anthropic said that chat and Cowork will initially be unified across web and desktop, with projects and artifacts living together in a shared workspace across both experiences.

Alongside the platform expansion, Anthropic released usage data drawn from 1.2 million anonymized and aggregated Cowork sessions collected across more than 600,000 organizations during the final two weeks of May. The data offered a striking picture of how the tool is actually being used: despite the outsized attention coding assistants have received across the broader AI industry, more than 90 percent of Cowork usage had nothing to do with software development.

According to Anthropic's breakdown, the largest usage category, accounting for 33.4 percent of sessions, involved general business process operations, including tasks such as pulling scattered updates into a single consolidated report, building employee onboarding checklists, and reconciling spreadsheets, work Anthropic said is common across finance, human resources and administrative roles. The second-largest category, representing 16.4 percent of usage, involved content creation and copywriting, covering tasks such as drafting documents, building slide decks, writing social media posts, and preparing proposals and other communications work typically associated with marketing and management positions. Software development, by comparison, accounted for just 8.7 percent of total Cowork usage, followed by DevOps and infrastructure work at 7 percent, research and intelligence tasks at 6.4 percent, data analysis and business intelligence at 5.8 percent, document processing and extraction at 4.1 percent, and sales and revenue operations at 4 percent. The remaining categories, including personal assistance, education and meeting intelligence, each represented less than 4 percent of overall usage.

Anthropic characterized the dominant use cases as "the work around the work" that keeps organizations functioning day to day, describing these as tasks that touch a broad range of roles without typically being anyone's primary job responsibility. "While coding is still — understandably — one of the uses of AI that gets the most attention, the use of AI for everyday business work is on the rise, and the kinds of tasks people are finding it most helpful for are coming into focus," the company said in a statement. "Our goal is to make this a reference point for people who are figuring out how to integrate AI products into their daily work, and to show where value is most concentrated."

The expansion of Cowork fits into a broader pattern across the AI industry, as major labs work to move their products beyond conversational chatbots into the everyday tools and workflows where office work actually happens. OpenAI has pursued a similar strategy with Codex, a tool that began as a software development aid but has increasingly been adopted by non-developers for tasks including reports, spreadsheets, presentations, research and data analysis. Anthropic has also continued expanding its own presence within existing workplace tools, having recently introduced Claude Tag, an always-on version of Claude that operates inside Slack and functions as an ongoing AI teammate within team communication channels.

To mark Tuesday's launch, Anthropic said it is extending doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5, giving early users additional room to experiment with larger and more complex tasks during the rollout period. The company said beta access will continue expanding to additional subscription plans over the coming weeks as the web and mobile versions of Cowork move beyond their initial Max-plan release.

With both Anthropic and OpenAI now pushing their agentic tools deeper into general office workflows rather than remaining confined to coding-specific use cases, the competition between the two companies increasingly appears centered less on which lab has built the most capable conversational assistant, and more on which company can position its agent as the default tool for the everyday administrative and operational work that occupies a significant share of time across nearly every role within an organization.