Claude Cowork launched in January as a desktop-only application and stayed that way for months. That changed on July 7, 2026, when Anthropic announced the tool is rolling out across web, iOS, and Android. The feature drawing the most attention isn't the new platforms or the unified interface. It's something more fundamental: the fact that work now keeps running in the cloud after your laptop closes and you walk away from your desk entirely.
Three things changed with the mobile and web expansion. First, sessions now sync across devices. Start a task at your desk, monitor it from your phone, pick up the finished output anywhere. Second, Cowork can now run tasks in the background with no device online at all. Schedule a client prep task for 6 am, close the laptop, and Claude will work through the email threads, Slack messages, meeting transcripts, and recent news, build the briefing document, and leave the follow-up email drafted but unsent for you to review over coffee. Third, when Claude hits a decision that needs human judgment, it sends a notification to your phone. Work pauses, you answer, it resumes. Anthropic also unified the interface. On web and desktop, chat and Cowork now share a single home screen, one sidebar, and one place for projects and artifacts. "Your work goes everywhere with you, and keeps going without you," Anthropic wrote in its announcement.
Alongside the launch, Anthropic published usage data from 1.2 million anonymized Cowork sessions between May 11 and May 31, across more than 600,000 organizations. The finding that caught most attention: software development accounted for less than 9% of total usage. The largest categories were business process operations, onboarding checklists, compiling scattered updates into single reports, and managing spreadsheets, followed by content creation, copywriting, and presentation decks. Knowledge workers, not developers, are driving adoption.
Beta is rolling out over the next several weeks, starting with Max plan subscribers, then expanding to other paid plans. Anthropic is extending doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5 to encourage larger delegations during the beta. Access is available through claude.ai on web, the Claude apps on iOS and Android via the sidebar, and the full desktop app at claude.com/download. Desktop retains the most complete local file and browser access.
The expansion arrives days after security firm Armadin, led by Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia, published research describing a sandbox escape in Claude Cowork on Windows involving DLL sideloading. Anthropic's response was that exploiting the vulnerability requires an attacker to already have local code execution on the host machine, so it does not qualify as a security issue under their policy. It is a dispute worth watching as Cowork becomes a cross-device tool handling calendar access, email, Slack, and file systems across more surfaces.
