Cowork, the digital colleague
- 01Opening Cowork and setting up your first workspace7 min
Cowork is a desktop agent that requires a paid plan and, to reach your local files, the Claude Desktop application open and connected; a Cowork project groups together folders, instructions and a memory that belong to it alone.
- 02What Cowork can reach, and what it must never touch8 min
Cowork's access breaks down into three distinct layers, connected folders, direct use of your applications and screen, and an isolated network that blocks internal addresses by default; in all three cases, permanently deleting a file always asks for your confirmation.
- 03Writing a brief Cowork can execute, then reading its plan before it starts8 min
A good brief names a result, its source, its destination and the workspace concerned, as if for a colleague starting that same day; Cowork answers with a plan that needs reading, because a wrong assumption spotted before execution is corrected at no cost, spotted after it can mean undoing writes already made.
- 04Choosing your approval level, step by step7 min
Cowork offers three approval modes, Manual which has you validate every action, Automatic which lets Claude review itself before acting, and No approval which no longer checks anything: permanently deleting a file stays confirmed in all three modes, a task can be stopped at any time, and on a Team or Enterprise account an administrator can remove Automatic mode from the selector.
- 05Rebuilding a real spreadsheet or report, not a draft to fix8 min
Cowork delivers finished files, a workbook with formulas that genuinely recalculate, a laid out slideshow, a formatted document, not just raw text to pick up from there: naming the exact structure expected or supplying a template to copy brings the result closer to what will actually be used, and a figure that displays correctly in a cell never proves that the formula which produced it is correct.
- 06Connectors: what they actually read and write7 min
A connector's capabilities are checked service by service: as recorded on 2 September 2026, the Google Workspace Gmail connector can send, reply to and forward messages directly, with approval requested by default before each send, which on a Team or Enterprise plan an organisation owner can allow members to lift, while the Microsoft 365 connector for Outlook can also send, but only once an administrator of the account has switched on that capability for the whole organisation.
- 07Scheduled task or Computer Use: the order Cowork tries7 min
Cowork first tries a connector, then the browser built into the desktop application, then as a last resort direct control of the screen, always in that fixed order, including for a scheduled task that runs unsupervised.
- 08Cowork everywhere, who can do what, and the trail left behind9 min
Cowork moved from desktop only to web and mobile on 7 July 2026 and remains in beta on these two surfaces, with cloud sessions that keep running with no device switched on at all; on an Enterprise account, custom roles bound access team by team, and Cowork's activity turns up in a technical export, not in the chat transcript itself, except for a session running locally on the machine, whose history stays only on that computer.