Course contents
What Is Claude Cowork
Claude Code for the rest of your work: an agent that does real tasks with real files — no terminal, no code.
For two years, programmers had something nobody else did: an AI agent that could actually do the work, not just talk about it. Claude Code reads files, makes changes, runs for minutes or hours, and comes back with finished results. Claude Cowork is that same engine pointed at everyone else's job — reports, spreadsheets, research, planning, file wrangling — with the terminal removed.
The shape of the product is simple: you point Cowork at a folder, describe an outcome ("turn these 40 receipts into an expense report", "draft the Q3 board update from these notes"), and Claude works. It reads your files, creates new ones, asks when it hits a real decision, and shows you everything before it counts as done. Launched as a research preview in January 2026 on macOS, by mid-2026 it had grown to Windows, the web, and mobile.
The mental shift is the same one programmers made: stop thinking of AI as a chat window you paste things into, and start thinking of it as a coworker you hand tasks to. A chat gives you an answer you then act on. Cowork acts — the deliverable at the end is a file you can open, edit, and send.
Anthropic's 2-minute introduction — watch this first to see what "an agent that works with your files" actually looks like.