Anthropic released its Claude Cowork AI agent for Windows this week, expanding the automation tool to approximately 70 percent of desktop users. The San Francisco-based AI company now positions Claude as a direct challenger to established enterprise software economics, moving beyond its original role as a model builder.
The Windows launch follows Claude's January 12 debut on macOS and arrives with full feature parity across both platforms. Users gain file access, multi-step task execution, plugin support, and Model Context Protocol connectors for external service integration.
Microsoft employees have reportedly begun testing Claude Code internally, with software engineers expected to compare it against GitHub Copilot.
Market reactions to Claude's expansion emerged earlier this month. On February 3, media reports described a significant tech share selloff in US and European markets attributed to Claude's new plug-ins. The S&P 500 software and services index dropped nearly four percent the following day, erasing $830 billion in sector market value over six consecutive sessions.
Microsoft's relationship with Anthropic accelerated in November when the companies announced a strategic partnership. The agreement provides Microsoft Foundry customers access to Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5 models. Anthropic committed to purchasing $30 billion of Azure compute capacity as part of the arrangement.
Investment interest in Anthropic continues to grow. Blackstone reportedly seeks to increase its stake in the AI company, which could value Anthropic around $350 billion. Amazon previously invested an additional $2.75 billion in March 2024, bringing its total Anthropic investment to $4 billion.
Enterprise adoption metrics show steady growth. The share of US companies paying for Anthropic AI tools increased to 20 percent from 17 percent, according to Ramp's spend-based tracking across 50,000 companies. Claude maintains its ad-free positioning, with no sponsored links adjacent to conversations and no advertiser influence on responses, positioning it as an ad-free alternative to ChatGPT, which has faced criticism for introducing ads despite its CEO previously calling them a last resort.
"Claude will remain ad-free," the company stated, addressing concerns about advertising formats in conversational AI products.
The commitment comes as Anthropic expands from research assistance into professional workflow automation, targeting work use-cases such as writing and legal document processing.
