Anthropic has introduced plug-ins for Cowork, its recently launched agentic tool designed to bring AI assistance beyond coding tasks. The new feature aims to automate specialized workflows across different company departments, Lucas Ropek reports for TechCrunch.
The plug-ins enable automated task handling for marketing content creation, legal document review, customer support responses, and other department-specific functions. Companies can customize plug-ins to define how Claude works, which tools and data sources to access, and how to handle critical workflows.
Matt Piccolella from Anthropic’s product team says the company expects enterprises to create bespoke use cases. Anthropic has open-sourced 11 in-house plug-ins and emphasizes that custom plug-ins require minimal technical expertise to build, edit, and share.
The plug-in functionality already existed in Claude Code. Anthropic now extends it to Cowork to reach non-technical users through a user-friendly interface. Piccolella highlights sales and data analysis as departments where plug-ins have shown particular promise, noting that sales teams benefit from better customer connections and feedback access.
Anthropic states that increased plug-in usage helps Claude learn company workflows and optimize them. Plug-ins currently save locally on user machines, but organization-wide sharing capabilities are planned.
Cowork remains in research preview two weeks after launch. Plug-ins are available to all paying Claude customers. Anthropic has not announced when Cowork will exit preview status.
