Anthropic's Claude Cowork expands to mobile and web, targeting knowledge workers

Anthropic has launched Claude Cowork on mobile and web platforms, broadening its reach beyond developers to a larger market of knowledge workers. This expansion transforms Cowork into a cross-device platform, allowing users to initiate tasks on a laptop and continue them autonomously on their phones, even after closing the application. The company released usage data from over 1.2 million anonymized sessions, revealing that most users are not employing Cowork for software development. Instead, business process and operations tasks, such as consolidating reports and building checklists, accounted for 33.4% of usage, making it the largest category. Content creation and copywriting followed at 16.4%, with these two areas comprising about half of all Cowork sessions. Software development represented a significantly smaller portion at 8.7%, with other categories like DevOps, research, data analysis, and document processing also showing lower usage rates. Anthropic describes these prevalent uses as "the work around the work," referring to tasks that support various roles but are not central to a specific job description, such as drafting status updates or condensing research. The mobile and web rollout introduces synchronized sessions across devices, background task execution, and human-in-the-loop decision-making via phone prompts. While desktop remains the most feature-rich, the web version increases accessibility for users unable to install desktop applications. This strategic move aims to capture the vast market of professionals who handle information organization and communication, differentiating from its developer-focused Claude Code product. The expansion is supported by the new Claude Sonnet 5 model, which enhances agentic capabilities for complex workflows.