Anthropic brings plug-ins to Cowork

Earlier this month, Anthropic launched Cowork, a new tool to help was designed to take the benefits of Claude Code’s AI assistant and turn it into a more user-friendly tool that non-coders can benefit from. Now Anthropic has launched a new feature within Cowork to make it even more powerful for business users.

See, plug-in.

The concept of plugins is simple: They are designed to perform “special” tasks in different departments of the company. Whether the task is to write content for the marketing department, analyze the risks in the documents of the company’s legal team, or write answers for customer support, this plugin is designed to use the agent automation system to solve tasks with a specific purpose.

The company says you can use plugins to “tell Claude how you like to work, what tools and data to pull from, how to handle complex tasks, and what rules to show your team to get consistent results.”

Matt Piccolella, who works on the product team at Anthropic, told TechCrunch that plugins are designed to be customized and that the company expects business users to create their own custom ones. Anthropic open sourced 11 of its internal plugins as part of Friday’s release, but noted that standard plugins are “easy to create, modify, and share” and can be used without much technical expertise.

Plugins already exist found within the Claude Code for a while, and their growth in Cowork is only designed to use the same and share it with different types of users. “Really, what we’re doing with this launch is just bringing them to Cowork and giving them an easy-to-use, UI-centric model that will allow more people to use it,” Piccolella said.

Piccolella pointed to data analysis and marketing as two departments within Anthropic where plugins have already shown promise. “The product has been huge, for the direct sales people, and just finding everybody who’s like a salesperson close by, well connected to the customer and customer feedback and all of that,” he said.

Anthropic says that when more business users use plugins, Claude knows more about the company’s performance and how to improve it. Currently, plugins are stored locally on users’ machines, though Anthropic says a team-wide sharing tool is on the way.

Cowork, which was just released about two weeks ago, is in its research phase. It is not known when it will begin in earnest. For now, the plugins will be available to all Claude’s paying customers, Anthropic says.