Anthropic brings Claude Cowork agent to mobile and web for the first time

Anthropic's Claude Cowork — its agentic 'work alongside you' experience — is escaping the desktop. The company confirmed iOS, Android and web availability, letting users start a session on one device and pick it up on another, with background work and scheduled tasks continuing to run remotely while the app is closed. The rollout prioritizes Max subscribers before reaching Pro, Team and select Enterprise tiers over the coming weeks.

Mechanically, the move matters because agentic tools have been tethered to a local machine that must stay awake for long-running tasks. Pushing Cowork to the cloud and to phones turns it into an always-on assistant that can schedule and resume multi-step jobs — a prerequisite if agents are to handle real workflows rather than single prompts. Anthropic paired the launch with extended access to its Claude Fable 5 model for premium subscribers through July 12, offering 50% of weekly usage limits before shifting users to metered credits.

Competitively, this lands the same week Microsoft began quietly routing Office prompts to cheaper in-house models and DeepSeek and Alibaba pressed low-cost alternatives — so Anthropic is answering cost pressure with capability and ubiquity rather than price. The mobile agent race now pits Cowork against OpenAI's ChatGPT agent mode and Google's overnight-research Gemini agent.

Watch two things: whether background execution introduces new billing surprises (developers are already tallying multi-dollar-per-task Fable 5 bills at $10/$50 per million tokens), and whether Anthropic's separately published 'J-space'/global-workspace research — which it says shows Claude mimicking how the human brain broadcasts information — is marketing framing or a substantive interpretability result. The consciousness-adjacent language drew immediate skepticism.