Claude Chat and Cowork become one unified Claude

Starting today, Anthropic is merging Claude Cowork and the regular chat into one unified Claude. Users no longer have to choose between the two interfaces themselves when they want to ask a quick question or hand off a bigger task. Instead, Claude judges whether a request calls for a short answer or a longer workflow, and tasks keep running in the cloud even after you've closed your computer.

The change comes after many users found the split confusing. Claude Chat and Cowork covered overlapping needs in practice, and it was rarely clear when to use one rather than the other. The situation resembles the similar confusion around ChatGPT and ChatGPT Work, which OpenAI has also recently tried to clean up by renaming its Codex desktop app to ChatGPT.

Along with the merger, Anthropic is introducing Claude Docs and Claude Slides, which make it possible to create, edit and export documents and presentations directly in the chat, including as PowerPoint or PDF. The existing Claude Design feature is also becoming an integrated part of conversations.

The update is rolling out first to Pro and Max users in the Claude app on web, desktop and mobile over the coming weeks. Team and free users will follow later, and enterprise administrators will get at least 30 days' notice before the changes take effect for them.

For the ordinary AI user, this means in practice that you no longer have to decide whether a task belongs in chat or in Cowork. On the other hand, it's not yet entirely clear what the new boundaries between the features will look like in practice, and it may take a while to work out what the change concretely means for daily use.

What it means for you

If you already use Claude to chat and solve tasks, you no longer have to choose between chat and Cowork yourself: Claude handles that automatically. If you're a Pro or Max user, you'll get the update over the coming weeks, while free and Team users will have to wait a bit longer. You can right away try creating documents and presentations directly in the chat and exporting them as PowerPoint or PDF. If you're an administrator at a company, you'll get at least 30 days' notice, so you have time to prepare your colleagues.