Claude Cowork — a coworker, not a chatbot.

Claude with permission to work.

Cowork is the Claude desktop app with permission to read, edit, and create files in folders you specify, and the ability to drive connected applications. You don't ask "how would I do this" — you ask Claude to do it. Output is real artifacts, in their right places, ready to use.

The shape of a Cowork session

1. You describe the task in plain English. "Pull the last six months of board minutes from this folder, identify every action item, and write a status memo for next Tuesday."
2. Claude plans. It outlines steps and shows what files and apps it'll touch. You approve or edit the plan.
3. Claude executes. Reads documents, drafts content, makes edits, opens browsers, calls connected apps.
4. You steer. At checkpoints Claude pauses and shows progress. You correct, redirect, or let it continue.
5. Done — the artifact is on disk, in the doc, on the calendar, in the email draft.

Three doorways into the same Claude.

All three run the same models. The difference is what each one is allowed to do and where it lives.

People who work in files.

Anthropic positions Cowork at researchers, analysts, operations teams, legal professionals, and finance teams — anyone who spends their day moving between documents, spreadsheets, slide decks, email, and shared drives. The pitch: spend your time on judgment, not assembly.

Five minutes from install to first task.

1. Install the Claude desktop app. Download from claude.ai/download. Mac and Windows native. (Cowork runs inside the desktop app — there's no separate installer.)
2. Sign in. Cowork is included on Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans.
3. Open the Cowork tab. Tabs: Chat (the familiar conversation surface), Cowork (the working surface).
4. Pick a working folder. A specific directory you want Claude to be able to read and write in. Start small — a single project folder.
5. Connect the apps you want Claude to use — Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Slack, DocuSign, FactSet. Each is OAuth; you can disconnect at any time.
6. Describe a task. Plain English. Watch the plan. Approve. Steer.

Scoped by you.

Cowork can only touch what you let it touch. The permission model has three layers — folders on disk, connected apps, and per-action prompts.

The connected apps.

Cowork ships with first-party integrations that cover the apps most knowledge workers live in. Anthropic added a wave of business connectors in early 2026: Drive, Gmail, DocuSign, FactSet alongside the original Calendar and file-system integrations.

Anthropic publishes connectors at a steady pace. Treat the list above as a snapshot of mid-2026; check the in-product directory for the current set.

Five shapes worth copying.

After a few months of real Cowork use, the same patterns keep paying back. Lift them whole.

1 · Triage

"Read everything in ./inbox/, sort by urgency and topic, and write a one-paragraph briefing on top of each cluster." Reproducible at the start of every Monday.

2 · Reconcile

"Compare these two spreadsheets. Find rows that differ. For each difference, draft an explanation in plain English." Pair with read-only access to the source-of-truth system.

3 · Synthesize

"Read these 40 PDFs. Pull every claim about X. Cluster the claims. Draft a memo with citations." Pair with the Files API or with on-disk PDF folders.

4 · Generate & route

"For each tenant in tenants.csv who hasn't paid May rent, draft a friendly reminder, save as a draft in Gmail, and log it to ./reminders/2026-05.md." Drafts only — never auto-send the first time you wire this up.

5 · Watch & report

Pair with /schedule: every weekday at 6am, run a Cowork-style routine that reads connected app data, writes a status file to disk, and emails it to you.

What admins get.

Anthropic shipped organization controls, role-based access, and centralized integration management with Cowork's general-availability rollout. The relevant controls for IT and security teams:

• Role-based access — admins, members, viewers, billing-only. Scope what each role can see and configure.
• Centralized integrations — the org connects an app once; members opt in. No more individual OAuth approvals scattered across a workforce.
• Audit logs — what was searched, which files were read, what was written, what was sent. Useful for regulated environments.
• Data controls — retention windows, regional residency for compatible plans, opt-out of training (default on enterprise plans).
• SSO & SCIM — Okta, Azure AD, others. Provision and de-provision via your existing identity stack.

Run it inside your AWS.

For organizations that need data and prompts to stay inside their AWS account, AWS and Anthropic ship Cowork on Bedrock. Same agent, same connectors, but the inference happens through Bedrock rather than Anthropic's first-party API.

• Data path — prompts and outputs traverse your Bedrock environment; logs land in CloudWatch.
• IAM — role-based access via the AWS identity model; layer over the Cowork role model.
• Cost path — billed against your AWS account at Bedrock rates; one bill instead of two.
• Use case — financial services, healthcare, public-sector deployments where vendor-cloud egress is prohibited.

For most teams the standard Anthropic-hosted Cowork is faster to set up and easier to administer; Bedrock is the right answer when policy requires it.

Treat the agent like a capable junior.

The model is good. The judgment is yours. A handful of habits keep Cowork productive and safe.

• Start in a sandbox folder. A dedicated ~/cowork/ directory you can wipe between projects. Build trust before pointing it at your main drive.
• Drafts before sends. Connect Gmail with draft-only scope until Cowork has produced a few hundred messages you've sanity-checked.
• Two-step destructive actions. Anything irreversible — delete, sign, send-now, drop-table — gets a confirmation prompt. Don't disable that.
• Periodic audit. Once a week, scan the audit log for any tool call you don't recognize.
• Memory hygiene. Cowork remembers what you tell it about your work. Review and prune the memory file the same way you'd review a colleague's onboarding notes.
• Don't paste secrets. If a credential lands in a Cowork session, rotate it. Same rule as for any other shared tool.

Related products.

Cowork sits alongside the rest of the Claude surfaces. Each has its own page on this guide.