Anthropic gets closer to an AI super app
What Claude merging with Cowork signals. Also: Meta's model release, China's AI shift, Fable lives on, and more.
The holy grail for the frontier labs is a super app that combines the power of AI coding with the simplicity of a chatbot, and I’ve spent time reporting on how OpenAI and Anthropic are each chasing it.
Today Anthropic inched closer. Claude Cowork, or Claude Code for people who don’t code, is being merged with the Claude chatbot interface on desktop, web, and mobile for Max users, and Cowork sessions can now keep running in the cloud after you close your laptop. Moving Cowork sessions to the cloud is the real step forward, because scheduled tasks can now run without a desktop machine powered on or a laptop propped open.
Mike Krieger, who ran product for all of Anthropic before recently moving to its shunkworks Labs group, sketched this exact step for me in May:
“Some of these products naturally suggest their next evolution. I’m a huge Dispatch power user. Dispatch lets you access your Cowork remotely, but you gotta run your computer. So the next logical thing is, well, this would be great if I didn’t have to leave my computer on all the time. Claude Code has been on that journey… Claude Code Remote I use all the time. I’m out on the go, I can kick off the coding task, and by the time I’m back it’s often put up a pull request. You can imagine similar things for Cowork.”
Cowork threads still don’t fully sync across desktop and phone. What could really move the needle on non-early adopters getting access to a multi-agent harness like Cowork is when it’s finally merged with the chat interface on the Claude mobile app, which may be what Krieger hinted at on X today: “Keep an eye out for even better Chat + Cowork integration soon, too.”
Cat Wu, who leads product for Claude Code and Cowork, told me in March why Cowork beats a normal chatbot.
