Anthropic merges Claude Cowork and chat into one Claude

Anthropic spelled out why the two products had been separate. The company said it built Cowork as a separate place for bigger work and Design for visual work, but people who used both told it the frustrating part was deciding where a task belonged, and what they started in one did not carry into the other. "So we stopped making you choose," the announcement reads, adding that Claude can now figure out what a task needs, so what Cowork and Design could do is available from any conversation, with the context, skills and connectors you already have.

Meaghan Choi, who leads design for Claude apps, explained in the launch video what Cowork had been for. "Cowork is where we worked out how Claude should take on bigger, multi-step work," she said, and once it got good at deciding what a task actually needs, "keeping it in a separate place just stopped making sense." She called the merge a first step and said the experience would keep improving as the models do.

Seen through an engineer's eyes, the heart of this change is task routing, not the user interface. According to the help center, you describe the outcome you want and Claude works through the steps itself, searching the web, reading your files and running code, then pulls the results together. A quick question still gets a quick answer, and several tasks can run at the same time. Heavier tasks keep running in the cloud, so the result waits in the conversation even if you close your laptop or leave the page, though tasks that touch files or apps on your computer need Claude Desktop open.

The three new tools connect inside the same conversation. Ask for a document and you and Claude write it together; ask for a presentation and Claude drafts the slides. Slides can be edited directly, presented straight from Claude, or downloaded as PowerPoint or PDF, and anything made with Claude Design, Slides or Docs lives at one shareable link that opens on your phone. You can select an element and move it, or tell Claude what to change. All three are in beta on paid plans, and Enterprise admins choose when to turn them on. Claude Design used on its own keeps working as before.

According to reports, Docs start out private like a Google Doc, can be shared with other editors who work on the document at the same time, let collaborators including Claude leave comments, and support export to Google Docs and Microsoft Word at launch. The developer account announced the same day that Claude Design, Slides and Docs also work inside Claude Code: point Claude at the actual files and RFCs in the repo, ask for a design review deck or a UI mockup, edit it yourself or keep going in the conversation, and share the link when it is ready. METAL previously reported that Claude Code opened a research preview of its /design skill for sketching UI drafts; now that output opens at the same link from both chat and code.

Permissions attach to the whole conversation. According to the help center, a setting in the message box controls how independently Claude works: the default, Manual, has Claude ask before it takes an action and lets you allow each one, while Auto keeps working without stopping at each step, with automated safety checks running before any action. You can change the setting at any time, stop or redirect Claude while it works, and the company advises staying close for work with real consequences, such as sending messages or changing important files.

Existing Cowork users get a moving guide. Cowork tasks, projects, connectors, skills, artifacts and files carry over, and Cowork tasks now sit alongside chats in Recents. The Cowork Global instructions setting has been merged into Instructions for Claude in Settings, the web search toggle is gone because Claude searches when it helps, and Research is reached by typing /deep-research or choosing it from the plus button. Once an account has moved to the new experience, it cannot switch back to the separate Chat and Cowork options.

The current limitations list METAL reviewed in the help center is not short. Add from GitHub is not supported, and branching a conversation from an earlier point is not available yet. Incognito chats open in the previous experience, so Claude cannot create files or run code in them, and search does not include older Cowork tasks. Dispatch is not available to new users, and existing users can keep using it for now. Everything counts toward plan usage limits, and the document notes that longer agentic tasks that search the web, run code or create files use more than a quick question.

The move to fold two products into one account had been visible for weeks. METAL reported that Claude merged its memory across chat and Cowork, and before that covered Cowork's expansion to all paid plans on mobile and web. Memory merged first, and the front door followed.

According to reports, the merge is read as part of the race to build a so-called superapp that handles search, writing, coding and file management in one window, and OpenAI has laid out plans to fold ChatGPT, Codex and its browser into one. Anthropic's coding product, Claude Code, remains separate for now. A cost question came up alongside, because agentic tasks that reason through multiple steps and call tools consume far more tokens than a simple exchange. That is why the help center keeps Manual as the default and gives usage its own section.

Andrew Keller, a senior economist quoted in the announcement, said, "I could have Claude pull up my legal research database, and it would pull all the cases, read them, figure out which other cases I might need, download them, and store them in a folder for my personal review." The official Claude post on X carrying the launch video had passed 1.12 million views when METAL checked, and the company said Team and Free plans will follow soon, with Enterprise organizations notified at least 30 days before anything changes. The partition between questions and tasks is gone, and Claude now makes that call for you.