{"id":231854,"date":"2026-01-14T01:28:18","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T01:28:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/231854\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T01:28:18","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T01:28:18","slug":"anthropics-claude-cowork-was-mostly-built-by-ai-in-2-weeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/231854\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic&#8217;s Claude Cowork Was Mostly Built by AI \u2014 in 2 Weeks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Anthropic&#8217;s new working agent was largely built by Claude itself \u2014 the latest example of AI coding tools speeding up product development.<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, Anthropic announced the release of Cowork, a &#8220;more approachable&#8221; AI tool accompanying Claude Code that&#8217;s geared toward fulfilling users&#8217; requests that are unrelated to programming. Users grant the agentic AI tool access to specific files on their computer and prompt it to complete tasks.<\/p>\n<p>Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, said that Anthropic&#8217;s AI coded &#8220;pretty much all&#8221; of Cowork.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;@claudeai wrote Cowork,&#8221; Product Manager Felix Rieseberg wrote on X. &#8220;Us humans meet in-person to discuss foundational architectural and product decisions, but all of us devs manage anywhere between 3 to 8 Claude instances implementing features, fixing bugs, or researching potential solutions.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As a result, Rieseberg said the first edition of Cowork came together quickly.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is the product that my team has built here, we sprinted at this for the last week and a half,&#8221; he said during a livestream with Dan Shipper.<\/p>\n<p>Over the holidays, Rieseberg said that Anthropic saw its customers using Claude for an increasing number of non-coding-related tasks.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This sort of like the research preview, very early Alpha, a lot of rough edges, as you&#8217;ve already seen, right?&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Cowork is initially available to Claude Max subscribers on the Mac app.<\/p>\n<p>The launch has made a splash in the tech world, with many online users praising the product and its accessibility.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think that&#8217;s a really smart product,&#8221; Datasette co-creator Simon Willison wrote in a <a target=\"_blank\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/simonwillison.net\/2026\/Jan\/12\/claude-cowork\/\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;click_type&quot;:&quot;other&quot;,&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;outbound_click&quot;}\" rel=\" nofollow noopener\">blog<\/a> about his experience. &#8220;Claude Code has an enormous amount of value that hasn&#8217;t yet been unlocked for a general audience, and this seems like a pragmatic approach.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is big,&#8221; Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian wrote on X.<\/p>\n<p>Because granting an AI agent access and the ability to take action on specific computer files comes with risk, Anthropic cautions that Cowork users should be careful.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;By default, the main thing to know is that Claude can take potentially destructive actions (such as deleting local files) if it&#8217;s instructed to,&#8221; the company said. &#8220;Since there&#8217;s always some chance that Claude might misinterpret your instructions, you should give Claude very clear guidance around things like this. &#8220;<\/p>\n<p>The latest in a flurry of AI announcements<\/p>\n<p>AI companies wasted no time in launching new offerings and partnerships to kick off the new year.<\/p>\n<p>On Sunday, Anthropic announced <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/anthropic-chases-openai-ai-heath-claude-2026-1\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Claude for Healthcare<\/a>, a major addition to its healthcare and life sciences offerings. Its release came on the heels of rival OpenAI signaling its investment in the healthcare space with <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/openai-announces-chatgpt-health-2026-1\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">ChatGPT Health<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Amid AI bubble chatter and scrutiny on the increasing AI investments made by tech companies, Anthropic CEO <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/dario-amodei\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Dario Amodei<\/a> has argued that Anthropic has built a more sustainable business model that allowed it to make more educated bets on its future build-out. While he did not name OpenAI or CEO Sam Altman directly, he made some thinly veiled criticisms of his former company throughout the event.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think because we focus on enterprise, I think we have a better business model,&#8221; Amodei said at The New York Times&#8217; Dealbook Summit. &#8220;I think we have better margins. I think we&#8217;re being responsible about it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Google, which some experts saw as <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/google-openai-gemini-chatgpt-ai-search-future-web-2025-11\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">overtaking OpenAI<\/a> at the end of 2025, announced a major deal with Apple to have <a target=\"_self\" class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/apple-google-gemini-to-power-siri-ai-capabilities-2026-1\" data-track-click=\"{&quot;element_name&quot;:&quot;body_link&quot;,&quot;event&quot;:&quot;tout_click&quot;,&quot;index&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;,&quot;product_field&quot;:&quot;bi_value_unassigned&quot;}\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Gemini power Siri<\/a>&#8216;s artificial intelligence capabilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthropic&#8217;s new working agent was largely built by Claude itself \u2014 the latest example of AI coding tools&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":231855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-231854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/231855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}