Claude Cowork Comes to Phones and Browsers, Adds Microsoft 365 Support

Anthropic has taken Claude Cowork beyond the desktop app it has run on since January. Starting July 7, Max plan subscribers can launch tasks from their phone and browser, and also gain new tools that let the agent write and send emails on its own, manage calendars, and create and edit files in Microsoft 365.

The biggest change is the ability to start a task on a computer, check its status on a phone, and pick up the finished result later, even after the laptop has been closed. The agent runs tasks in the background on Anthropic's servers, so it doesn't need a device to stay on to keep working.

What's new in Microsoft 365

Until now, Claude's Microsoft 365 integration mostly allowed reading documents and messages. The new write tools change that fundamentally: the agent can draft and send an email on its own, update mailbox settings, add a calendar event, and create or modify a file in OneDrive or SharePoint.

Turning these features on isn't automatic. A Microsoft Entra administrator must first accept the expanded set of permissions before activating them for the entire organization. The safeguard is meant to limit the risk of the agent sending something unwanted or changing data without human oversight.

What people actually use the agent for

Data from 1.2 million Cowork sessions shows that, despite Claude's common association with coding, programming accounts for less than a tenth of usage. The largest category, reaching a third of all tasks, is business processes: reports, checklists, spreadsheets. Content creation and copywriting, meaning text drafts, presentations, and proposals, come in second.

Our goal is for this to become a reference point for people wondering how to weave AI products into everyday work, and to show where the value concentrates most - Anthropic

A race for the desk, not just the terminal

The Cowork expansion fits a broader trend in which companies building coding agents are trying to bring the same technology to the rest of office work. OpenAI is making a similar move with Codex, extending its programming tools toward reports and data analysis. Microsoft has gone even further, integrating Cowork's own technology into its Copilot Frontier tier, using the Claude Opus 4.8 model instead of its own MAI models.

For Polish companies using Microsoft 365, this means an AI agent could in practice take over part of routine correspondence and office administration, provided the IT department decides to grant it the necessary permissions. That raises questions about control over what the agent sends on an employee's behalf, especially at organizations without clear rules for auditing such actions.

What's next

Anthropic says it will gradually roll the new features out to subscription plans beyond Max in the coming weeks. The company hasn't yet said when the Microsoft 365 write tools will reach users outside the largest corporate organizations, or whether they'll come to cheaper Claude plans.

Sources: TechCrunch (techcrunch.com), Technology.org (technology.org)