The AI Claude Code “only” programmed. With Cowork, Anthropic wants its AI to take care of everything else
Claude Code has become a revolution for programmers, but at Anthropic they are not satisfied with that, and now they want their Claude family AI models to serve much more. And that’s why have created Coworka different agent, especially ambitious and who opens the door to fantastic options… if you trust him. What is Cowork. Those responsible for this project have taken the foundations of Claude Code and applied them to the Claude desktop application (for now, only the macOS one). But they have also done something equally special: giving Claude permission to access a specific folder on our computer and, from there, he can take control of those files and work with them as we want. Hello, robot-secretary. Instead of access to the “vibe coding” we will have access to a kind of “vibe working”. Thus, we can ask Cowork to do all kinds of operations with those files: If we have a folder full of disorganized icons, we can ask you to ordered them to us and reorganize them all into folders by file type or theme If there are a lot of photos of receipts in that folder, we can tell you to create an expense report If what we have is a bunch of digital voice or text notes, we can ask you to write a report summarizing and combining them all. If we have a folder full of podcasts, we can have it go through it, analyze it and summarize the top 10 points of all of them or transcribe them If you have all your financial trading and investment reports and data, you can ask them to create a final report for you. help you declare them If you have videos and want to find one of a squirrel and then convert it to another format, also does. Full autonomy. We are therefore faced with an AI agent capable of accessing our files, analyzing them and working with them to generate new information and useful content from all that data. And we only have to ask it with natural language, because the agent is capable of understanding it, asking us questions if it needs more details, and then solving the task autonomously even if it involves several steps. Cowork operates in a container. The way CoWork works allows you to grant permission to certain folders, but when the AI operates on said files it does so in isolation. As explains Simon WillinsonClaude uses a virtual machine and downloads and boots a custom Linux file system to operate on those files independently and isolated, which theoretically guarantees that our files are theoretically safe and Cowork does not access anything that we have not given permission to. Connections to other apps. In addition to being able to work directly with your files, Cowork benefits from its ability to connect with other applications that you have installed on your computer. You can use ffmpeg to convert the squirrel video, Asana if you want to organize your notes into projects, or an office application if you need to create a spreadsheet. But we will have to trust. Willinson himself warns that these types of systems have the danger of someone “hacking” them with jailbreaking or prompt injection techniques that now become more dangerous because, as we say, what Cowork does is work on our files. And of course we have to be careful with the information and data we share with CoWork: those responsible for Anthropic themselves have a document to “use it safely“. Limited release. Cowork is available as a “research preview”, and is only available to users of the Claude Max subscription which costs between $100 and $200 per month. It is clear that at Anthropic they prefer to go step by step with a very powerful but also delicate feature if we do not use it with caution: in the end we are giving access to our files to an AI, and we know that AIs can make mistakes. An AI on your computer. This release from Anthropic points to what all AI agents that want to conquer our computer should theoretically point to. Since that Computer Use that Anthropic launched in October 2024, things have come a long way, and little by little we are getting closer to that future in which we will be able to work with our computer in a very different way than we did until now… if we want and trust AI, of course. In Xataka | Operator also “looks” at the screen and moves your mouse for you like other AI agents. It does it better thanks to CUA