Anthropic updates Claude Cowork tool built to give the average office worker a productivity boost

Anthropic's Claude Cowork, which rocked Wall Street last month, is getting a wider release.The artificial intelligence startup launched a series of connectors and plugins for the knowledge worker tool on Tuesday that enterprises can use to help "turbo charge" the capabilities of individual employees.Anthropic launched Claude Cowork in a research capacity last month, rattling software stocks as investors grappled with AI's disruptive potential. The company said Claude Cowork's new updates mark its transition into a true enterprise-grade product.Starting Tuesday, organizations will be able to connect Claude Cowork to their existing tools like Google Drive, Gmail, DocuSign and FactSet. They can also deploy customizable plugins across domains like financial analysis, engineering and human resources that encode institutional knowledge and workflows, Anthropic said."We're trying to make it much more accessible and much more ready for anyone to be able to use," Kate Jensen, Head of Americas at Anthropic, told CNBC in an interview.Investors were on edge ahead of Anthropic's expected announcement. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF closed down nearly 5% on Monday.Anthropic has had early success selling to the enterprise market, which accounts for roughly 80% of its business. But the five-year-old company is racing to fend off growing competition from rivals like OpenAI and Google, who have also set their sights on lucrative enterprise contracts.With its updates to Claude Cowork, Anthropic is looking to build on the momentum of its existing products like Claude Code, its AI coding tool that has seen a wave of adoption across companies over the last year. "Engineers think about Claude Code as a tool that they just couldn't live without anymore," Jensen said. "We expect that every knowledge worker will feel that way about Cowork."The startup was founded in 2021 by a group of researchers and executives from OpenAI, which kickstarted the AI boom with the launch of its ChatGPT chatbot in 2022. Anthropic launched Claude, its flagship chatbot, the following year, and its valuation has since swelled to $380 billion.Jensen said Claude Cowork goes beyond the basic chatbot interface that users have come to know, and that the tool's real-time context from its internal connectors should help employees feel like they're getting a real productivity boost."We're actually bringing the context that we need and the admin controls that enterprises really have always cared about to make these experiences for the end users just really different than anything they've really had before," she said.WATCH: A once quiet rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic is heating upGot a confidential news tip? We want to hear from you.Sign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inboxGet this delivered to your inbox, and more info about our products and services.© 2026 Versant Media, LLC.

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