Anthropic merges Claude chat and Claude Cowork

Until now Claude users faced two choices in the input box, Chat and Cowork, and had to decide for themselves which one suited the job at hand. Cowork existed as a separate place for larger, multi-step work such as research and report writing, and work begun in one could not be carried over to the other. Anthropic says users told it that judging which function to use was itself a burden, and that as its ability to judge what a task needs improved, keeping a separate space no longer made sense.

The merged experience lets Claude pick its own means, such as web search, reading files, or running code, inside a single conversation. Alongside it, Anthropic is adding Claude Docs for documents, Claude Slides for presentations, and in-conversation access to Claude Design. Outputs can be edited directly, presented from Claude, or downloaded as PowerPoint or PDF. All three are beta features on paid plans, with Enterprise administrators choosing when to enable them. Existing Cowork settings and content carry over, though some limits remain at launch, including no GitHub additions and no branching a conversation from an earlier point.

How quickly this lands for any given user hinges on the gradual rollout, which varies by account even within the same plan, and on the switch being one-way once it happens. For heavier users, another factor is that usage counts against plan limits, and long agentic tasks involving web search, code execution, or file creation consume more than short questions.