Claude Cowork is expanding beyond the desktop. Anthropic has announced that its agentic task-execution feature is rolling out to mobile (iOS and Android) and the web, with a key architectural upgrade: scheduled tasks now run entirely in the cloud, meaning your laptop no longer needs to be open for Claude to keep working.
This is a meaningful shift. The biggest bottleneck of the original Cowork was the open-laptop dependency: if your computer went to sleep or you closed the application, all active tasks halted immediately. That limitation is now gone for scheduled tasks.
What Cowork actually is
Claude Code is a command-line tool designed for developers. Cowork brings the same agentic architecture to the desktop app, designed for non-coding knowledge work. No terminal required. Think of it as the same engine that powers Claude Code, but pointed at everyday office tasks instead of codebases.
Claude Cowork launched in research preview in January 2026 and reached general availability across all paid plans in April 2026. Cowork grants Claude access to a user-specified folder on the local computer; Claude can read, edit, and create files autonomously, supporting multi-step task execution and sub-agent coordination for parallelizable work.
And the tasks people are actually using it for might surprise you. More than 90% of Cowork usage is not software development. The dominant categories are business operations and content creation: reconciling quarterly spend, turning folders of contracts into renewals trackers with flagged risks, building client decks from call transcripts and pipeline data. Together, that's roughly half of all usage.
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