Home / Cowork, the digital colleague

Opening Cowork and setting up your first workspace

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.

Cowork is Anthropic's desktop agent. Opening a session requires a paid plan, Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise, as recorded on 2 September 2026, and the Claude Desktop application must stay open and connected on your computer for Cowork to reach your local files, even when the session runs in the cloud: this application acts as the bridge between the remote server and your hard drive.

The project, the space that keeps what it learns

A Cowork project groups together attached folders, instructions written once and for all, and a memory that belongs to it. A project's memory stays walled off: what Cowork learns in an Accounting project does not resurface in a Recruitment project, even opened on the same day on the same account. A Cowork session running in the cloud, however, shares its general memory with Claude chat, since a change that took effect on 25 August 2026, on the Free, Pro and Max plans; on Team and Enterprise, memory stays switched off until an administrator has turned it on and the person has activated it. A session running purely locally on your machine uses no memory of this kind. Remember the practical rule that follows from this: create a separate project per subject rather than a single catch-all project, and check for yourself on your own screen, in the project's settings, what it actually contains before entrusting it with sensitive information.

A project's instructions specify what Cowork should keep in mind for every future task opened in that space, an expected tone, a usual output format, or a standing rule such as never renaming a file without prior confirmation. They can be read and changed at any time from the project's settings, without needing to be repeated with every new request.

The four steps of a first task

Once the project is created and a real folder attached, a task follows this same four-step pattern.

Describe: "Sort the invoices in this folder by month, keeping their original name."
Plan: Cowork proposes a sequence of steps before touching anything.
Review: you read each step and correct what is missing.
Execute: Cowork acts, and you find the result in the folder.

The third step, review, is your own move, not a step that Anthropic's documentation describes as part of the product: it speaks of Cowork analysing the request, creating a plan and coordinating the work, never of a built-in human review. The next lesson comes back in detail to what makes a brief usable from the first attempt, and to what to read in the plan before letting it run.