Claude Co-work is an AI desktop assistant developed by Anthropic, designed to bring Claude's AI capabilities to your desktop for knowledge work. Unlike traditional chatbots, Co-work can handle complex, multi-step tasks autonomously, such as organizing files, creating documents, and synthesizing research. It's built upon the same agentic architecture as Claude Code but offers a graphical user interface, making it accessible to non-technical users. Co-work can directly read and write to local folders, create plans, execute multi-step tasks in parallel, and work independently.
Co-work is currently available as a research preview for Claude Pro and Max plan subscribers using the Claude Desktop app on macOS. To use it, users can open the Claude Desktop app and switch to "Tasks mode". Since Co-work handles complex tasks, it consumes more of your usage allocation. Claude’s AI platform offers four plans: Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise. The Pro plan costs $20 per month, while the Team plan costs $30 per month (or $25 if billed annually) with a minimum of 5 members. While Anthropic doesn't disclose the price for its Enterprise plan, some users report it at $60 per seat for a minimum of 70 users and a 12-month contract. Co-work runs in an isolated virtual machine on your computer with controlled file and network access, ensuring your documents and data stay local.
