Anthropic made a version of its coding AI for regular people

"If you follow Anthropic, you're probably familiar with Claude Code. Since the fall of 2024, the company has been training its AI models to use and navigate computers like a human would, and the coding agent has been the most practical expression of that work, giving developers a way to automate rote programming tasks. Starting today, Anthropic is giving regular people a way to take advantage of those capabilities, with the release of a new preview feature called Claude Cowork."

"Anthropic gives a few different example use cases for Cowork. For instance, you could ask Claude to organize your downloads folder, telling it to rename the files contained within to something that's easier to parse at a glance. Another example: you could use Claude to turn screenshots of receipts and invoices into a spreadsheet for tracking expenses. Cowork can also navigate websites - provided you install Claude's Chrome plugin - and make can use Anthropic's Connectors framework to access third-party apps like Canva."

""Cowork is designed to make using Claude for new work as simple as possible. You don't need to keep manually providing context or converting Claude's outputs into the right format," the company said. "Nor do you have to wait for Claude to finish before offering further ideas or feedback: you can queue up tasks and let Claude work through them in parallel.""

Anthropic released a preview feature called Claude Cowork that allows non-developers to let Claude access a folder on their computer to read, edit, or create files. Claude Cowork can automate tasks such as organizing downloads, renaming files, converting receipt screenshots into expense spreadsheets, and navigating websites via a Chrome plugin. Cowork can also use Connectors to access third-party apps like Canva. Cowork eliminates repetitive context sharing, supports queued tasks, and enables parallel work. Claude cannot access files without explicit permission but can perform potentially destructive actions, including deleting files, if granted access.

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