If you opened the Claude desktop app this morning and things looked a little different, you’re not imagining it. Anthropic has rolled out a significant update, and it’s one I’ve been longing for since Cowork became a thing: Chat and Cowork now live in the same place.
This landed as part of a bigger announcement on 7 July. Anthropic is rolling Claude Cowork out to web and mobile (in beta, starting with Max plans), and as part of that, Chat and Cowork now share one home on desktop and web. One sidebar, one search, and one place for your Projects and Artifacts.
You’ll need to update your desktop app for these changes to take effect, so if you’re not seeing them yet, that’s your first step.
Here’s what’s changed, and why I think it matters for how you work with Claude.
One home for Chat and Cowork
The biggest shift is that you now switch between Chat and Cowork inside the chat window itself. There’s a simple toggle in the message box, and you choose the mode per conversation.
Hover over each option and Claude tells you exactly what it’s for. Chat is “Chat with Claude, one response at a time”.
Cowork is “Give Claude a task (or a few) to run autonomously”.
Through these little information bubbles, Anthropic has given us it’s clearest framing to date on the distinction between Chat and Cowork. Chat is for working with Claude one response at a time: brainstorming, drafting, thinking things through together. Cowork is for handing Claude a task (or a few) and letting it run autonomously until the job is done.
It might take a little getting used to, but it feels far more logical to me. Now I can decide within each new conversation in a project whether it needs to be a chat or a coworking session, rather than deciding which app experience to live in.
Projects are finally in one place
This is the bit I’m delighted about. Projects are now merged into the one space, shared across Chat and Cowork.
Why does this matter? Because whether you’re having a chat or running a Cowork task, Claude is drawing from the same knowledge source, and all of those conversations are saved in the one place. No more trying to remember whether you did a piece of work in a chat or a Cowork folder. They now live together.
I’d pretty much given up on using Chat because I wanted to keep all of my conversations within a single project. I knew that came with drawbacks, because Cowork is more token intensive. Now I’m far more likely to switch back to Chat for those conversations where I want to work with Claude one response at a time, and reserve Cowork for when I want Claude to complete tasks autonomously. The right tool for the job, all within the same project.
Anthropic has also flagged that even better Chat and Cowork integration is coming soon, so this is the start of the merge, not the end of it.
A word of warning on duplicate projects
One thing to check after you update. If you previously imported a project from Chat into Cowork, the content from both now seems to have merged into the one project, which is great.
But if you set a project up from scratch in Cowork and gave it the same name as one you had in Chat, or your instructions differed slightly between the two versions, you might find you now have two versions of the same project sitting side by side. Some tidying might need to occur.
The good news is that the fix is straightforward. Move the content from one project into the other, then blend the instructions so they’re correct for all of the work you’re doing in that project. Or, if the two projects are actually doing distinctly different jobs, rename them so it’s obvious which is which.
The new composer for Cowork tasks
When you’re in Cowork mode, you can now open a new composer that sits in the bottom right of the app. Handy for firing off a task without losing your place. On Mac, the shortcut is Cmd+; (or Cmd+N for a new task).
The composer also gives you a choice about how much control you keep. You can manually approve each action, where Claude pauses so you can approve every step, or skip all approvals, where Claude never pauses, even for unsafe actions.
My take? Manually approving each action is the Human-Led, AI-assisted way, especially while you’re building trust with a new workflow. But once you’re confident in your workflow, skipping approvals is where the power kicks in, especially for routine tasks you’ve run many times before. Just go in with your eyes open, and always check the outputs. You lead, AI assists.
Do more with Claude: apps and extensions in one spot
The update also brings a new “Do more with Claude, everywhere you work” screen, which gathers all the places Claude can plug into your world.
Finding it is the tricky part. You get to it from a well-hidden little icon that looks like a download link, sitting next to your account name in the bottom left-hand corner of the app. For me, it was flashing blue when I upgraded my app to draw my attention to it, but now it just sits there, almost invisible, and is super easy to miss.
Claude Design gets top billing. It’s Anthropic’s chat-and-canvas design tool for building prototypes you can click, wireframes from a sketch, slides from your documents, demo videos from a script, and anything else you can describe.
From the same screen you can install Claude for Microsoft 365 (Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook) and Claude Code for your terminal, VS Code, JetBrains or Slack.
There’s also the Claude for Chrome extension, which lets Claude navigate, click buttons and fill forms in your browser (and works in Cowork), plus the mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Meanwhile, your skills, connectors and plugins haven’t moved. They still live within the Customize section of your settings, alongside a new Extensions area under the Desktop app settings.
The bigger picture: Cowork goes to web and mobile
The desktop merge is actually one piece of a larger rollout. Claude Cowork is coming to web and mobile, which changes three things:
Your work follows you. Start a task at your desk, check on it from your phone, and pick up the finished output anywhere. Being tied to my laptop has been the major limitation and frustration of using Cowork, so this is the thing I’m most excited about. When it finally reaches me, that is.
Work continues in the background. Close the laptop and head to your meeting. Claude keeps going. Scheduled tasks now run in the cloud with no device online. Think Monday’s client prep running at 6am, ready for you to review over coffee.
The decisions still come to you. When Claude reaches a call only you can make, the question reaches your phone. Nothing ships until you’ve reviewed and approved it.
Desktop remains the full Cowork experience, because that’s where Claude can work with your local files and browser. And that brings me to the one thing I’m disappointed about in this announcement: they haven’t enabled Cowork to work directly with your files in the cloud.
But I predict that will only be a matter of time, in the same way I predicted Chat and Cowork would eventually merge. And it can’t come quickly enough for me. That’s when Cowork is going to become super powerful, particularly for use across teams, where it has some major limitations at present.
How Cowork will work on the web and mobile
I’m not seeing Cowork on web or mobile myself yet (no matter how much I keep refreshing). Anthropic says it’s rolling out gradually over the next few weeks, starting with Max plans, so even those of us on Max are in the queue. What follows is what Anthropic has published about how it will work, and I’ll report back once I’ve had a proper play with it.
The magic behind it all is that these Cowork sessions will run remotely on Anthropic’s servers rather than on your computer, with your sessions and files saved to your Claude account. That’s how your work will follow you between devices, and why Claude will keep going when you close the laptop.
Starting a session is reported to work the same way everywhere. Find the message box, select Cowork in the bottom-left corner, and describe your task. On the web, it’ll be at claude.ai under the Home tab. On mobile, you’ll need the latest version of the Claude app for iOS or Android. If you don’t see the Cowork option yet, you’re in the same boat as me.
According to Anthropic’s help centre, the essentials will work on every surface, starting, steering and reviewing tasks, resuming a session you started somewhere else, connectors, skills, plugins, scheduled tasks, projects, and previewing the files Claude creates. When Claude finishes a task or needs your input, a notification lands on your phone. I am really looking forward to this!
The limitations to know about
Before you get too carried away, the documentation flags some caveats:
- Anything that touches your actual computer will still need the desktop app open. That means local file access, local connectors, browser use and computer use will work from web and mobile only while the desktop app is running on your machine. Close the app and your session keeps going, but it can’t reach your local files until you open it again.
- Projects tied to a local folder will only support Cowork sessions on desktop. And Cowork won’t change a project’s contents, so anything you want to keep needs to be added to the project yourself.
- Live artifacts are desktop only for now, and computer use is still a research preview limited to Pro and Max plans.
None of these look like dealbreakers. They’re the natural consequence of the desktop app being the bridge to your computer. But it seems web and mobile will be for steering and reviewing work, while the desktop remains home base for anything touching your files.
Two sweeteners worth knowing about
To mark the launch, Anthropic is extending its doubled Cowork usage limits through to 5 August. If you’ve been waiting to give Cowork a proper go on bigger tasks, now’s the time.
They’ve also extended the period in which you can use Claude Fable 5 as part of your current subscription. Promotional access was originally due to end on 7 July, but paid plans can now keep using Fable 5 for up to 50% of their weekly usage limit through to 12 July. After that, it moves to usage-credit billing, though Anthropic has said it intends to bring Fable back into standard plans once capacity allows. If you haven’t taken Anthropic’s most capable generally available model for a spin yet, don’t leave it too long.
What this means for you
If you’re a service-based business owner building your marketing systems with AI, this update removes one of the biggest friction points in the Claude desktop app. You no longer have to choose between the project continuity of Chat and the autonomous grunt work of Cowork. They’re in the same place, drawing from the same knowledge, saving to the same history.
Update your app, check your projects for duplicates, and start being deliberate about which mode each conversation needs. Chat when you want a thinking partner. Cowork when you want a doer.
That’s Human-Led AI Marketing in action. You lead. AI assists.
