Anthropic merged Claude Cowork into its main chat and launched two beta tools, Claude Docs and Claude Slides, so users no longer pick a mode before starting work.
Key Points:
- Claude now decides on its own whether a request needs a quick reply or a longer agentic task.
- Claude Docs and Claude Slides arrive in beta, with PowerPoint and PDF downloads for finished work.
- Pro and Max subscribers get the update first, while Team and Free plans will follow later.
Claude Cowork Merger
The company announced the change Wednesday and said it is rolling out to Pro and Max plans over the coming weeks on web, desktop and mobile. Team and Free plans will follow later, the company said. Enterprise admins will get at least 30 days of notice.
Claude now works out what a task needs, drawing on Cowork and Claude Design features from any conversation with existing context, skills and connectors. Jobs keep running after a user closes the laptop, and progress can be checked from a phone along the way.
Users can write documents with the assistant or have it draft slides that can be edited, presented or downloaded as PowerPoint or PDF files. Tasks can also run on a schedule. A user could, for example, set Claude to prepare a weekly report with five slides for a leadership meeting every Monday.
Also Read: Bitcoin Mining Faces 50% Hashrate Gap While AI Draws Capacity
Anthropic Takes On OpenAI
Anthropic said users found it frustrating to decide where each task belonged, and work begun in one space did not carry into the other. Economist Andrew Keller, a customer quoted by the company, described Claude pulling cases from a legal research database, reading them and saving them to a folder for his review.
The redesign removes an extra step for users. Support for PowerPoint and PDF files could ease adoption at firms that rely on Microsoft and Google office software, where those formats still dominate. The move also puts Anthropic in closer competition with OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT Work in July by pairing its chatbot with the Codex coding tool.
Similar confusion has long dogged OpenAI's ChatGPT and ChatGPT Work.
Anthropic launched Cowork in January as a research preview that brought the agent workflow of Claude Code to office workers outside software development. It later gained projects, connectors, plugins, scheduled runs and cloud execution. Claude Design debuted in April for website and prototype work, and its standalone version will keep working as before for people who prefer it.
Read Next: Shiba Inu Fixes Shibarium's Broken Wallet Link, But SHIB Slides 6% In A Week
