TL;DR: Anthropic\u2019s new AI agent, Claude Cowork, has impressed industry experts, journalists, and productivity obsessives with its ability to carry out multistep computer tasks on your behalf. But for me, it\u2019s not so much a coworker as it is a professional cleaner you\u2019ve hired to organize your messy digital home.<\/p>\n
What happened: Claude Cowork, released earlier this week, is Anthropic\u2019s buzzy new agentic AI tool that bridges the gap between the developer-focused Claude Code and what a typical office worker might need. (Anthropic also boasts that Claude Code wrote Cowork in under two weeks<\/a>, with a little help from human software engineers.)<\/p>\n The bottom line: Cowork marks a shift from chat-only AI assistants to one that lives and operates on your computer\u2014as long as you give it access to everything. Anthropic just made it available to all Pro subscribers<\/a>, so you can get it for $20 a month (we had to fork out $100). For your money, Cowork can read, edit, create, and organize your files. (It can also delete them if you\u2019re not careful.) It didn\u2019t overhaul how I use my computer day to day, but it\u2019s a glimpse of how people might use AI in their daily workflows in the very near future.<\/p>\n Where Claude Cowork was great:<\/p>\n Organizing my chaotic desktop by file type\u2014dumping screenshots, PDFs, and Word documents into separate folders\u2014without touching existing folders.Deleting and organizing emails. We live in email-slop hell; I had over 10,000 messages in Gmail, including more than 4,000 unread. I gave Claude very detailed rules for what to keep and what to delete. It took an hour or two, but my Gmail storage usage dropped from 64% to 31%.Intelligently renaming all my screenshots based on what they depict.Searching my emails for receipts from the past month (both in email bodies and attachments), downloading them into an Expenses folder, and tallying the spending in a spreadsheet. It wasn\u2019t fast, but it did it accurately.Finding the best movie showing. I asked Claude to find the most central theater for my friend group, with seats in the middle rows. It found a time and place that met all my parameters.<\/p>\n Where it was so-so:<\/p>\n Identifying nuanced email types. When I asked Claude to label PR pitches, it initially lumped newsletters in too. After clarification, it improved but still didn\u2019t catch all of them.Handling multiple Google accounts. Claude sometimes got confused about which account it was pulling from, even with the correct one open in a tab.Compressing large video files. Compression is slow in general, but Claude was glacial\u2014it didn\u2019t even finish one after about an hour. About 30 minutes in, it noticed the snail\u2019s pace and switched compression methods. It also couldn\u2019t replace the originals due to a permission issue, so I had to clean up manually.Granting folder access. Sometimes Claude gave up if it lacked access; other times it asked me to point it to the right folder, or found it and prompted me to approve access.<\/p>\n Where Claude fell flat on its face:<\/p>\n It could not find a PDF I downloaded earlier that day and summarize it in five bullet points. The only response: \u201cPDF too large. Try reading the file a different way (e.g., extract text with a CLI tool).\u201dIt wasn\u2019t able to filter top news stories. I asked Claude to identify major tech news from the past 24 hours. Aside from its questionable news discernment, it kept surfacing stories from days earlier.It failed to do simple macOS tasks without extra setup. For example, adding a to-do list to the Reminders app required installing Claude Code (a whole process) and issuing the command there (easy once installed). At first, Claude merely gave me instructions on how to open the Reminders app or give a voice command to Siri like I was its boomer parent. Thanks, Claude!Tech news that makes sense of your fast-moving world.<\/p>\n Tech Brew breaks down the biggest tech news, emerging innovations, workplace tools, and cultural trends so you can understand what’s new and why it matters.<\/p>\n Conclusion: My time with Claude Cowork was a nice collaboration, but not worth $100 a month (for $20, however, it could be worth it). Using it felt like a preview of what could come next\u2014something closer to an AI agent baked into a device, without the need for endless connectors and extensions. (Lenovo<\/a> and Apple<\/a> are both attempting to add agentic AI to devices.) With Cowork, nearly every step triggers a permission pop-up, which is understandable for security reasons but cumbersome nonetheless. True seamless integration isn\u2019t here yet\u2014and unlike a real coworker, you can\u2019t exchange an annoyed look with Claude when the all-hands runs too long. \u2014WK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TL;DR: Anthropic\u2019s new AI agent, Claude Cowork, has impressed industry experts, journalists, and productivity obsessives with its ability…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242759,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-242758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}