Since its launch, Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s agentic tool for knowledge workers, has run only on the desktop, leaving it tethered to a computer that had to stay open and on for Cowork to do its work, including running scheduled tasks. Anthropic is changing that on Tuesday by bringing Cowork to the web and mobile, and moving all of its work to the cloud, so tasks keep running even when no device is online, and users can switch devices at will.Subscribers to Anthropic’s Max plans, which start at $100/month, get beta access now, and the company expects to bring the updated Cowork to more plans in the coming weeks.The update also brings Claude Chat and Cowork closer together. On web and desktop, chat and Cowork now share a single interface, and projects and artifacts are carried across both. You switch between Chat and Cowork by using a modal, not by going to a different part of the Claude UI. On mobile, Cowork will have its own section in the app.Credit: AnthropicBringing Chat and Cowork closely together means “delegating is now as easy as asking,” Anthropic argues. Still, the company will also have to make sure it explains to its users how the two features differ. When Cowork first launched, a whole cottage industry of explainers sprang up around it, in part because a basic back-and-forth chat feature is still the default for how most users interact with AI tools. AI agents are still new to the vast majority of knowledge workers, after all. On the other hand, though, maybe this will also get more users to experiment with Cowork to automate more workflows — and schedule more tasks.From Claude Code to the chat windowAt its core, Cowork takes the agentic capabilities of Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding agent, and makes it accessible to users who would never open a terminal. It launched in January and lets non-developers hand Claude a task and have it work across their files, calendar, email, messaging apps, the web, and other connected tools until the job is done. “This move gives Anthropic the always-on agent that so many users want, without the inconvenience of having to keep a computer running at all times.”In April, Anthropic took Cowork out of preview and into general availability on its paid plans, adding the role-based access controls and governance features enterprises had asked for.Until Tuesday, though, all of that ran on the laptop and stopped when the lid came down.The work continuesAnd that’s where the biggest update comes in. The work goes on and, maybe even more crucially, scheduled tasks run, even if your Mac mini is offline. Running tasks on a schedule is what many users do with something like OpenClaw or a hosted service like Tasklet.This move gives Anthropic the always-on agent that so many users want, without the inconvenience of keeping a computer running at all times. For most knowledge workers, that will get them 90% of the way to the promise of an OpenClaw (and the use cases it enables), without any of the associated risks.One caveat: if you have existing scheduled tasks, they won’t transfer automatically. “Existing scheduled tasks keep running locally and require your device to be on,” an Anthropic spokesperson told The New Stack. “New scheduled tasks run in the cloud automatically, and you will be able to move an existing task over from the Scheduled tasks page.”Of course, this doesn’t mean there’s no place for Cowork on the desktop, though. For now, Anthropic notes that the Claude desktop app remains “the place for deep work” because it can access a user’s local files and browser (how long until Claude gets an ad hoc browser in the cloud?).“The work around the work”Anthropic also published a new report about Cowork usage and notes that, at this point, more than 90 percent of Cowork usage isn’t software development (based on 1.2 million anonymized sessions in May). The single largest category, a third of all sessions, is business operations: reconciling spreadsheets, pulling scattered updates into one report, building onboarding checklists. Content creation and copywriting add another 16.4 percent. Credit: AnthropicTogether, those two make up roughly half of Cowork usage. Anthropic calls this “everyday knowledge work” and notes that it is “rarely in anyone’s job description, but a large share of everyone’s week.” Anthropic and others have long argued that AI and AI agents will free knowledge workers from the grunt work of putting together spreadsheets and presentations.Software development accounts for 8.7 percent, which still seems high, given that Claude Code lives just one tab away in the desktop app. As Anthropic notes in its report, “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.”Catching up to MicrosoftBringing Cowork to the cloud also closes a gap with Microsoft, which launched Copilot Cowork in March. It is based on Anthropic’s Claude engine and agentic harness, but it always ran in the cloud (and inside a customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant), from the start. Google’s Gemini Agent Mode and OpenAI’s Operator are chasing the same non-developer automation space.To mark the launch, Anthropic is extending doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5. Now that the work runs in the cloud, the pitch that Cowork “keeps going without you” is finally something users can put to the test.Credit: AnthropicThe post Anthropic’s Claude Cowork now keeps working when you close your laptop appeared first on The New Stack.