Software development accounted for less than 9% of Claude Cowork usage before Anthropic took it mobile and web. Business operations and content creation made up roughly half.
That data, drawn from 1.2 million Cowork sessions across 600,000 organizations in late May, explains why Anthropic is untethering its agentic assistant from the desktop. Starting Tuesday, Cowork is available on mobile and web for Max subscribers (at $100 a month), with broader plan availability following in the coming weeks.
The desktop app launched in January as a Claude Code-style tool for delegating multistep tasks. But the data tells a different story about who actually uses it. The largest usage category at 33.4% was business process operating: reconciling spreadsheets, building onboarding checklists, pulling scattered updates into reports. Content creation and copywriting followed at 16.4%, drafts, slide decks, proposals, social posts. Software development landed at 8.7%.
"While coding is still -- understandably -- one of the uses of AI that gets the most attention, the use of AI for everyday business work is on the rise," Anthropic said in a statement. The company described Cowork's sweet spot as "tasks that are part of a broad swath of jobs, but are rarely a person's core responsibility."
The mobile and web expansion removes Cowork's biggest limitation: it previously required the desktop app to stay open and the laptop to stay awake. Users could send tasks via the Dispatch feature, but the actual work stopped the moment the lid closed.
Now, scheduled tasks run in the cloud, and users can start work on a desktop, check progress on a phone, and retrieve finished output without any device online.
Anthropic's launch video shows a user prompting Cowork to pull data from email threads, Slack channels, meeting transcripts, and recent news for a business deal renewal. The agent generates a briefing document and a draft follow-up email. The user reviews it over coffee.
On web and desktop, chat and Cowork now share a single unified interface, with projects and artifacts accessible across both. The desktop app remains the place for deep work with local file and browser access, while mobile and web extend the tool to users who never installed the desktop application.
Anthropic is also doubling Cowork usage limits through August 5 to mark the rollout. The company separately extended access to Claude Fable 5, its most capable consumer model, through July 12 for all paid plans.
The expansion positions Cowork alongside rivals making similar bets. OpenAI's Codex started as a developer tool but is increasingly used by non-developers for reports and spreadsheets.
Google launched Spark, its always-on agent, earlier this year. For Anthropic, the bet is that the agent that handles the "work around the work" becomes indispensable not because it writes code, but because it owns the administrative layer that keeps companies running.
