Course contents
Usage, Sharing, and Admin Controls
Make your plan's usage last, share skills, plugins and projects with colleagues, and know which admin settings shape what Cowork can do at work.
Why tasks cost more than questions
Everything you do with Claude counts toward your plan's usage limits, and Cowork tasks use more than chat. Every step Claude takes uses tokens: each file it reads, each search, each tool call, each file it writes. On Pro, Max, Ultra, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans, Settings > Usage shows progress bars for your five-hour session and your weekly limit; verified Ultra accounts have no five-hour limit. Inside a Cowork task, type /usage or /cost for an inline card with your limits and the session's usage, without sending anything to the model.
On Team and Enterprise plans, each member draws on a per-seat allowance shared across chat, Claude Code and Cowork, with a rolling five-hour window and a weekly window. A Premium seat on the Team plan gets five times the usage of a Standard seat.
You're near your weekly limit with three days to go. Which habit stretches it without hurting your results?
Anthropic's other tips for making limits last: start a new conversation for unrelated work, so Claude isn't carrying extra context; tell Claude when you only need a quick answer, not a file; and keep documents you reuse in a project, where cached content counts less against your limits when it's used again.
Sharing your best work
| What | How it's shared | Good to know |
|---|---|---|
| Skills | With specific people (and groups, on Enterprise), or published to your organization's library | Shared skills are view-only, and recipients get your updates automatically |
| Plugins | With specific people, or published to your organization | Owners can offer a plugin as Installed by default, Available to install, Required, or Not available |
| Projects | Can view or Can edit access, on Team and Enterprise | Group sharing is in beta on Enterprise |
| Artifacts | Individual artifacts, by link | Whole Cowork sessions can't be shared |
What your admin controls
On a Team or Enterprise plan, an owner shapes what Cowork can do before you ever open it. Knowing the switches tells you why something is missing, and what to ask for.
- Cowork on or off. Organization settings > Cowork has an Enable for your organization toggle. Cowork is on by default, except in organizations set up for HIPAA, where it starts off.
- Cloud sessions. A separate Run Cowork in the cloud toggle: on by default for Team, off by default for Enterprise.
- Browsers. The built-in browser and Claude in Chrome can each be turned off, and Claude in Chrome can be limited to an allowlist of sites.
- Auto mode. Under Organization settings > Capabilities, owners decide whether Automatically approve is available and whether new tasks start in it.
- Connector approvals. Allow "Always allow" for connector tools is off by default, so members approve write-capable connector tools on each task.
- Web access. Owners set network egress and can turn off web search for Cowork and Chat.
- Monitoring. Owners can stream Cowork events, including tool calls, file access and approval decisions, to security tools through OpenTelemetry. Enterprise adds the Compliance API and role-based access by group.
Match each admin setting to what it does.
Pick one on the left, then its partner on the right.
Rolling out to your team
You lead an eight-person operations team on a Team plan, and you're setting Cowork up with your company's owner.
The owner asks whether to turn on Allow "Always allow" for connector tools, so people stop seeing approval cards for Gmail and Drive writes.
/usage show inside a Cowork task?Plain-English definitions from the AI Coding Dictionary.