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Anthropic Folds Claude Cowork Into Claude, Adds Background Task Handoff

Short answer

Anthropic is merging Claude Cowork and standard Claude chat into a single Claude experience. Users can hand off a task, close their laptop, and Claude keeps working on it. Rollout starts with Pro and Max plans on web, desktop and mobile, over the coming weeks.

What this means for operators

For a 10-200 person company already using Claude to draft reports, summarize tickets or prep sales materials, the practical change is fewer product surfaces to manage internally: no more deciding whether a task goes to Cowork or to chat. If the persistence claim holds up in practice, a team member could hand off a longer research or drafting task at the end of the day and pick up the result the next morning without babysitting a session, which matters for ops and support workflows that run outside standard hours. The catch is that this is a Pro/Max rollout over unspecified weeks, so teams on other plans or in early rollout windows should not plan workflows around it yet, and the actual feature boundaries are still unclear even to close observers.

Anthropic is merging its two Claude products, Cowork and standard chat, into a single Claude interface, according to a company announcement covered by Simon Willison. The stated goal is to let a user "bring a quick question, or hand over a report due at noon, and Claude takes it from there, even after you've closed your laptop."

The change rolls out first to Pro and Max plan subscribers, in the Claude app across web, desktop and mobile, over the coming weeks, reaching both existing and new users on those plans. No specific dates beyond "starting today" and no pricing changes are given.

Willison notes the move suggests Claude is becoming a general-purpose agent rather than a chat tool with a separate work mode bolted on, and draws a parallel to OpenAI's earlier renaming of its Codex desktop app to ChatGPT. He also flags that the practical boundaries between what Cowork used to do and what the merged Claude now does are still unclear, and that working this out will take further investigation.

This is a product consolidation and a persistence feature, not a new model or a documented capability list. Anthropic has not published, in the material covered here, which specific tasks can now survive a closed laptop session, how long they run, or what happens to output if a task fails while unattended.

Source: Simon Willison

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