Anthropic launched Claude Cowork on mobile and the web on Tuesday. At the same time, it added something more interesting than a list of new features. It published data from 1.2 million uses, revealing one thing: almost nobody uses this tool for programming. Coding accounts for just 8.7% of all usage. The rest is ordinary office work.
Yet Cowork grew out of programming. Anthropic built its reputation among developers with the Claude Code tool, and in January it introduced Cowork as “Claude Code without code.” It was a way to give the same automated assistant to people who never open a terminal. Now the company has shown that this plan worked differently than expected.
New changes in Cowork
The expansion to mobile and the web brings three specific changes. The first is synchronization across devices. You can assign a task on your laptop at your desk, check its progress from your phone, and retrieve the finished result from any browser.
The second major change is that Cowork can now run in the background even when none of your devices are turned on. Scheduled tasks run on Anthropic’s servers. The company illustrates this with an example of Monday client preparation scheduled for six in the morning. Claude goes through email threads, call transcripts, and the latest news, compiles a briefing document, and prepares a draft email that it leaves unfinished and unsent. You can then read it at your leisure over your morning coffee.
The third feature addresses situations that require a human decision. When Claude reaches a point that requires human judgment, such as before sending something, it sends a question directly to your phone. Nothing is sent without your approval. You can also redirect a task that is already underway at any time.
Anthropic has also merged the traditional chat interface and Cowork into one place. On both the web and desktop, your projects and outputs are now kept together, whether you are simply chatting with Claude or assigning it several hours of work. To encourage people to try the new feature, the company has doubled usage limits until August 5.
Work around the work
Alongside the launch of the mobile version, Anthropic released a study based on 1.2 million user sessions. The sample comes from more than 600,000 organizations and companies. The system automatically classified usage into twenty categories.
The largest category is called operations and business processes. It accounts for 33.4% of all usage. This includes reconciling spreadsheets, compiling onboarding lists for new employees, or combining scattered updates into a single report. Content creation and copywriting came second at 16.4%. This includes drafts, presentations, proposals, and social media posts. Together, these two categories account for roughly half of everything people use Cowork for.
Software development? Just 8.7%. It is followed by DevOps and infrastructure at 7%, research and analytics at 6.4%, and data analysis at 5.8%. Personal assistance accounts for 3.8%, education for 2.4%, and processing meeting notes for just 1.8%.
Anthropic coined the term “work around the work” for this type of task. These are activities that are not formally part of anyone’s job description but are woven into nearly every role in a company. According to Anthropic, it is connective work that moves projects forward and keeps the company running. People reportedly use Cowork mainly to assemble and organize information that they then use to take action themselves.
One strategy and two paths
Claude Code, the terminal-based programming assistant, dominates among developers when it comes to creating, debugging, and shipping code. Cowork is aimed elsewhere. It wants to reach a much larger group of people whose work consists of creating, sorting, and sharing information rather than writing code. Interestingly, even when developers themselves use Cowork, they generally do not use it for programming. They turn to it for the communication surrounding their role, such as status reports, documentation, and coordination.
Anthropic described Cowork as the descendant of a programming tool. Then it released a study proving that almost nobody uses it for programming. This is neither an accident nor an embarrassment. It is exactly the point. Developers are a clearly defined group willing to pay, but their numbers are limited. What is more, every AI lab is competing for the same developer licenses. The much bigger prize is everyone else in the building.
The catch with price and security
The web and mobile versions are still in testing and are available only to subscribers of the Max plan, which costs one hundred dollars a month in the US. That is a significant difference compared with competitors’ cheaper plans. Anthropic promises that the Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans will also receive access “in the coming weeks,” but no specific date has been announced yet.
The role of the desktop version also remains crucial. It continues to have access to local files and the browser, which neither mobile nor the web can do. Cloud sessions do continue running even after the desktop application is closed, but once it is shut down, they can no longer access local files. Mobile and the web are sufficient for lighter task monitoring and approvals, but the desktop remains necessary for deep work involving the file system.
Running tasks in the background also raises security concerns. Security experts have already disclosed an alleged sandbox escape in the Windows version. Anthropic disputes its severity, but the concern remains. Tasks now run unattended and outside the user’s direct supervision, so companies working with sensitive data should monitor which connected applications they have granted persistent permissions to. Scheduling a task to run without an active device present increases the potential for credential abuse.
Competitors are in a similar position. In June, Microsoft made its own Copilot available for long, multi-step tasks within the Microsoft 365 suite. OpenAI is promoting its Codex tool, which also began as an aid for developers and is now used by non-coders for reports and spreadsheets. Google launched its always-on Spark tool this year. But Anthropic is the first major company to say openly, with numbers to back it up, that the greatest demand for automated assistants comes not from developers, but from everyone else.
