Anthropic launched Claude Cowork on mobile and web this week, transforming its desktop-only autonomous agent into a cross-device platform. The rollout, currently in beta for Max subscribers, enables tasks to start on a laptop, continue autonomously in the background, and be reviewed from a phone—even after the user closes the app.
The timing coincided with the release of usage data from 1.2 million anonymized Claude Cowork sessions across more than 600,000 organizations. The numbers tell a story that cuts against the dominant narrative in enterprise AI.
The work around the work
Business process and operations—tasks like pulling scattered updates into a single report, building onboarding checklists, and reconciling spreadsheets—accounted for 33.4% of all sampled sessions, making it the single largest category. Content creation and copywriting came in second at 16.4%. Together, those two categories represent roughly half of all usage.
Software development, by contrast, accounted for just 8.7%. DevOps and infrastructure followed at 7%, with research and intelligence at 6.4%, data analysis at 5.8%, and document processing at 4.1%.
Anthropic describes these dominant use cases as “the work around the work”—tasks that span nearly every role in an organization but rarely appear in anyone’s core job description. The company is positioning this as a new category of AI productivity: handling everything professionals do around their actual expertise, rather than replacing what they actually do.
What mobile changes
The expansion introduces three concrete capabilities. First, sessions sync across devices—a user can start a task at their desk, check progress from a phone, and retrieve output from anywhere. Second, Cowork can run tasks in the background with no device online. Users can schedule work for a specific time, and Claude executes it autonomously. Third, when Claude encounters a decision requiring human judgment, it surfaces the question to the user’s phone. “Nothing ships until you’ve reviewed and approved it,” Anthropic states.
The web version also opens Cowork to users who cannot install a desktop application—a meaningful expansion in enterprise environments where IT departments control software installation.
The security question
The expansion arrives against a backdrop of unresolved security concerns. On July 1, security firm Armadin published research detailing what it described as a full sandbox escape in Claude Cowork on Windows. Anthropic responded that the vulnerability did not qualify as a security issue because exploiting it requires an attacker to already have local code execution. The web and mobile versions run tasks server-side rather than in a local virtual machine, eliminating that specific attack surface.
Anthropic is extending doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5 to encourage adoption. The company’s two-track strategy is clear: Claude Code serves developers, while Cowork targets the vastly larger population of knowledge workers whose work involves creating, organizing, and communicating information rather than writing code.