Claude Cowork, Anthropic’s Claude Code-style agent for general knowledge work, is coming to your phone.

Claude Cowork launched as a desktop app in January, but starting Tuesday it will be available on the web and mobile devices for Max subscribers. With the update, users can start a task from their desktop, get status updates on their phone, and pick up the finished result later, even if their laptop is closed.

The product expansion is a sign that Anthropic wants Cowork to feel less like a coding tool for dummies and more like an agent-driven administrative coworker: something that can run in the background, walk you through devices, and solicit human input when a decision arises that only the user can make.

In other words: the encryption agent wars are spreading to the rest of the office.

The move comes as AI companies try to take their products beyond chatbots to everyday surfaces where work is actually done. OpenAI has made a similar move with Codex, which started as a software development tool but is increasingly used by non-developers for reports, spreadsheets, presentations, research, data analysis, and more.

For both labs, the bet is that success will depend less on who has the best chatbot and more on who owns the space where the work is done.

That push extends to other applications as well. Anthropic recently launched Claude Tag, an always-on Claude who lives in Slack and acts as an AI teammate.

Beyond the benefits of a specific interface, launching Cowork as a cross-platform app means the agent can continue running tasks in the background without an online device, the company claims.

An example from Anthropic reads: “Set Monday’s client readiness for 6am: Claude reviews email threads, transcripts and recent news, puts together the briefing document, and leaves the follow-up email drafted but unsent. Review it over coffee.”

The desktop app will still be the place for deep work, where Claude will be able to access local files and the browser. But bringing Cowork to the web and mobile means that people who didn’t install the app can use it, too. Anthropic says chat and Cowork will be unified across the web and desktop to start, with projects and artifacts coexisting on both.

Anthropic also released initial data from Cowork, which suggests the clearest use case for the tool is the “work around work” that keeps businesses running, handling what Anthropic calls “tasks that are part of a wide range of jobs, but are rarely a person’s primary responsibility.”

The study sampled 1.2 million aggregated and anonymized Cowork sessions from more than 600,000 organizations during the last two weeks of May.

The largest category, at 33.4%, was business process operation: incorporating scattered updates into a single report, creating onboarding checklists, and reconciling spreadsheets. Anthropic said the tasks are common across finance, human resources and administration roles.

The next largest category at 16.4% was content creation and writing—tasks like drafts, slideshows, social media posts, proposals, and other communication work typically performed by marketing and management positions. In comparison, software development only accounted for 8.7% of Cowork usage.

“While coding understandably remains one of the uses of AI that receives the most attention, the use of AI for everyday business work is on the rise, and the types of tasks for which people find it most useful are beginning to come into focus,” Anthropic said in a statement. “Our goal is to make this a reference point for people who are figuring out how to integrate AI products into their daily work and show where the value is most concentrated.”