VentureBeat’s source URL was unavailable at the time this article was prepared. Claims attributed to VentureBeat have not been independently verified against the live article. The Anthropic blog post is the primary source for product details.
Anthropic has released Cowork, a capability that extends the agentic loop of its Claude Code developer tool to non-technical users. The feature is available as a research preview through the macOS desktop application for Claude Max subscribers. According to VentureBeat’s reporting, the feature was built in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself.
The launch follows an observed usage pattern, according to VentureBeat: after releasing Claude Code, Anthropic noticed developers using it for tasks with no connection to coding.
How shadow usage shaped the product
Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic, described that pattern publicly on X after the launch, as reported by VentureBeat. “Since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work: doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email, cancelling subscriptions, recovering wedding photos from a hard drive, monitoring plant growth, controlling your oven,” he wrote.
Anthropic described this as the direct catalyst, according to VentureBeat: developers “quickly began using it for almost everything else,” which “prompted us to build Cowork: a simpler way for anyone — not just developers — to work with Claude in the very same way.”
According to VentureBeat, Anthropic describes the interaction model as feeling “much less like a back-and-forth and much more like leaving messages for a coworker.”
File access and the agentic loop
Cowork requires users to designate a specific folder on their local machine. Within that sandbox, the agent can read existing files, modify them, or create new ones. Anthropic’s examples include reorganizing a cluttered downloads folder with intelligent renaming, generating a spreadsheet of expenses from receipt screenshots, and drafting a report from scattered notes across multiple documents.
The system is built on Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK, which means it shares the same underlying architecture as Claude Code. When a user assigns a task, the agent executes steps and asks for clarification if it encounters a problem, according to VentureBeat. Users can queue multiple tasks and let Claude process them simultaneously.
According to VentureBeat, Cowork also integrates with Anthropic’s existing connector ecosystem and can pair with Claude in Chrome, Anthropic’s browser extension.
Development timeline
During a livestream hosted by Dan Shipper, Anthropic employee Felix Rieseberg confirmed that the team built Cowork in approximately a week and a half, according to VentureBeat.
Simon Smith, EVP of Generative AI at Klick Health, wrote on X in response: “Claude Code wrote all of Claude Cowork. Can we all agree that we’re in at least somewhat of a recursive improvement loop here?” — as reported by VentureBeat.
Anthropic has not released detailed figures on how much of the codebase Claude Code generated versus how much was written by human engineers. Cowork is in research preview, which Anthropic describes as an early-stage product.