Anthropic’s new working agent was built primarily by Claude himself. This is the latest example of an AI coding tool to speed up product development.
On Monday, Anthropic announced the release of Cowork, a “friendlier” AI tool that comes with Claude Code. It is intended to satisfy the needs of non-programming users. Users grant agent AI tools access to specific files on their computers and prompt them to complete tasks.
Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, said Anthropic’s AI has coded “almost everything” in Cowork.
“@claudeai wrote Cowork,” product manager Felix Rieseberg wrote on X. “While we humans meet in person to discuss basic architecture and product decisions, all of our developers manage between three and eight cloud instances where they implement features, fix bugs, or explore potential solutions.”
As a result, Riseberg said the first edition of Cowork was completed quickly.
“This is a product that my team built here, and we’ve been working hard on this for the past week and a half,” he said on a livestream with Dan Shipper.
Leesburg said he saw customers using Claude for non-coding-related tasks during the holidays.
“This is kind of a research preview, very early alpha as we’ve already seen, with a lot of rough edges, right?” he said.
Cowork is initially available to Claude Max subscribers on the Mac app.
The launch was a hot topic in the tech world, with many online users praising the product and its accessibility.
“I think this is a really smart product,” Datasette co-creator Simon Willison blogged about his experience. “There is tremendous value in the Claude code that has not yet been released to the public, and this seems like a pragmatic approach.”
“This is big,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote of X.
Anthropic warns that Cowork users should be careful because the ability to grant access to AI agents and perform actions on specific computer files comes with risks.
“By default, the main thing to know is that Claude can perform potentially destructive actions (such as deleting local files) when instructed to do so,” the company said. “You need to give Claude very clear guidance on things like this, because there’s always a chance that he’ll misunderstand your instructions.”
Latest information on successive AI announcements
AI companies were quick to launch new services and partnerships to kick off the new year.
On Sunday, Anthropic announced Claude for Healthcare, a major addition to its healthcare and life sciences offering. The release comes shortly after rival OpenAI announced an investment in the healthcare space with ChatGPT Health.
Amid talk of the AI bubble and increased scrutiny of tech companies’ increased investment in AI, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that Anthropic is building a more sustainable business model that allows it to make more educated bets on future expansion. Although he did not directly name OpenAI or CEO Sam Altman, he made several thinly veiled criticisms of his former company throughout the event.
“I think we have a better business model because we’re focused on enterprise,” Amodei said at the New York Times’ Dealbook Summit. “I think the margins have gotten better. I think we’re responsible for that.”
Google, which some experts expected to overtake OpenAI by the end of 2025, announced a major deal with Apple to bring Siri’s artificial intelligence capabilities to Gemini.
