Anthropic brings agentic plug-ins to Cowork

Earlier this month, Anthropic launched Cowork, a new agent tool designed to take the benefits of its AI coding assistant Claude Code and turn it into a more general-purpose tool that non-coders could benefit from. Now Anthropic has launched a new feature within Cowork to make it even more powerful for business users.

Behold, the plugin.

The idea behind plugins is simple: they are designed to automate “specialized” tasks within the different departments of a company. Whether drafting content for the marketing department, assessing risk in documents for a company’s legal team, or drafting responses for customer support, the plugin is designed to use agentic automation to streamline work with a specialized focus.

The company says you can use plugins to “tell Claude how you want the work done, what tools and data to extract, how to handle critical workflows, and which slash commands to release so your team gets more consistent results.”

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

Plugins have already been there available within Claude Code and their extension to Cowork is just for using and sharing that same tool with different types of users. “What we’re really doing with this launch is bringing them to Cowork and giving them that kind of user-friendly, UI-focused flavor that allows the maximum number of people to use them,” Piccolella said.

Piccolella pointed to data analytics and sales as two areas within Anthropic where plugins have already shown promise. “Sales have been really strong, both for our direct salespeople, but also for everyone who is close to sales, better connected to the customer and customer feedback and all that,” he said.

Anthropic says that the more business users use plugins, the more Claude knows about a company’s workflows and how to optimize them. Currently, plugins are stored locally on a user’s computer, although Anthropic says an organization-wide tool to share them is on the way.

Cowork, which was just released about two weeks ago, is currently in research preview. It is unclear when it will be launched more widely. Plugins will be available to all paying Claude customers for the time being, Anthropic says.