Claude Cowork: If this isn't AGI, I don't know what the word means anymore.

We don't usually cover Claude Code in this newsletter (and we won’t do it this time, either, so don’t panic-close the tab just yet). It runs in the terminal, it's geared toward developers, and explaining how to set up a virtual environment to our audience felt like explaining why you should learn to drive stick in 2026.

Very cool. Also, quite irrelevant for most of us.

But we've been quietly using it. A lot. To build little tools that save hours, even to write production-grade marketing software. And if you've been anywhere near it since Opus 4.5 launched late last year, you've witnessed something that felt less like an upgrade and more like a door opening to a different room entirely.

But that room required a keycard most marketers don't carry.

That changed a few hours ago. Anthropic launched Cowork, available now for Max subscribers on the Mac desktop app. Cowork takes everything that made Claude Code extraordinary and wraps it in an interface anyone can use. No terminal, no command line, no technical setup.

Here's how it works: you give Cowork access to a folder on your computer (again, on a friendly interface, not in some Matrix terminal). From there, it can read your files, edit them, or create new ones—including Word documents, PowerPoints, and spreadsheets with no friction. It can use your browser to research, navigate, and extract information. It can tap into your existing connectors—Notion, Gmail, Google Calendar, whatever you've already linked to Claude. And unlike a chatbot that waits for your next prompt, Cowork plans. You describe an outcome, it figures out the steps, executes them in parallel, and loops you in when it needs clarification or approval. Then it keeps going.

Dump a folder of receipt screenshots and ask for an expense report—Cowork will read each image, extract the data, and produce a formatted spreadsheet. Ask for a competitive research brief on a company, and it will ask clarifying questions about scope and focus, run web searches, and deliver a polished Word doc in minutes. These aren't demos, these are things you can do today.

I also ran my own test. I asked Cowork to prepare a weekly brief: review last week's call transcripts, check my calendar, pull tasks from Asana and Todoist, and summarize the priorities, stakeholders, and issues to watch. It did all of that and generated a neat briefing document. But I could have asked for a standup meeting slide deck or a status report to send to my boss. Then I asked if we could save the workflow to run weekly. It created a skill—for itself—to do exactly that. On demand. Every Monday. Without me touching a line of code.

If this isn't AGI, I genuinely don't know what the word means anymore.

This is still a “research preview”, and there are bugs. You need to be on a $100 per month plan at a minimum (the best spent $100 per month ever, I’d argue). Some connectors don't always connect. The interface occasionally shows you more of the sausage-making than you'd want. And the security warnings are worth reading, because prompt injection is a real risk when you give an AI this much agency. But the bones are here, and they're strong.

For months, we've said AI would shift from assistant to coworker. Cowork is the first product that actually feels like that shift—not in marketing copy, but in practice. It is a huge leap, and it is going to change a lot of things about work, very quickly.

— Torsten & Peter

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