Anthropic Simplifies Claude’s Cowork and Design Tools

Anthropic is breaking down some of the silos inside its AI chatbot, Claude. Starting now, Claude Cowork and Claude Design will just be inside your normal Claude experience, Anthropic announced on Wednesday.

Anthropic has quickly made its AI a new kind of staple in the modern workplace, competing with OG tech heavyweights like Google and Microsoft. But AI adoption in the workplace has been rocky, from unclear policies to haphazard implementation and “work slop” that is making some people’s days longer and more unpleasant. Changes like these aren’t big, but they’re one step Anthropic is taking to make its AI more usable and, ideally, make the people who use it more productive and inclined to return to the chatbot.

The idea behind the redesigned interface is to make it easier to access the Claude services you need right where you start your AI work — the prompt bar. So you won’t need to bounce between the dedicated Claude Cowork experience for writing your reports and the beta Claude Design tab to turn that report into a slide deck, for example. You can still use custom project folders to keep all your related chats and project files in one place.

Excluded from this redesign is Claude Code. This makes sense because coding is a different kind of AI activity, where a separate interface is necessary.

You can also create documents and slide decks more easily through new, dedicated “output” widgets called, you guessed it, Claude Docs and Slides. You can share these AI-generated files with other people to edit using a shareable link or download as a PDF or PowerPoint. Similar to the Design beta, employees using Claude through an enterprise plan may not have access to the new tools, depending on their workplace’s AI permissions.

These changes will first roll out to people on the most expensive Pro and Max plans over the next few weeks, on web, mobile and desktop. Anthropic plans to bring it to free and Team users afterward. Folks on enterprise plans won’t see changes immediately either.

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Katelyn is a reporter with CNET covering artificial intelligence, including chatbots, image and video generators. Her work explores how new AI technology is infiltrating our lives, shaping the content we consume on social media and affecting the people behind the screens. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in media and journalism. You can reach her at kchedraoui@cnet.com. See full bio