Earlier this month, Anthropic introduced Cowork, a new agentic tool that builds upon its AI coding assistant Claude Code to serve as a more versatile resource for users without programming backgrounds. The company has now enhanced Cowork with an additional feature aimed at increasing its utility for enterprise clients: plug-ins.

The concept behind plug-ins is straightforward—they are built to automate specific, department-focused tasks across an organization. This could involve creating marketing content, assessing document risks for legal teams, or formulating customer support replies. By employing agentic automation, these plug-ins are intended to refine and expedite specialized workflows.

According to the company, plug-ins enable users to instruct Claude on preferred working methods, which tools and data sources to access, how to manage essential processes, and what shortcut commands to make available, all to help teams achieve more uniform results. As part of Friday’s release, Anthropic made 11 of its internal plug-ins open source, while also noting that custom versions are “easy to build, edit, and share” and can be implemented without deep technical knowledge.

Plug-ins have been a feature within Claude Code for a while, and their integration into Cowork is essentially about extending that same functionality to a broader audience. “With this launch, we’re essentially bringing them to Cowork and giving them a user-friendly, interface-focused design that will make them accessible to as many people as possible,” explained Piccolella.

He highlighted data analysis and sales as two areas at Anthropic where plug-ins have already demonstrated value. “Sales has been a major use case, not only for our direct sales staff but also for anyone involved in sales-related functions, helping them stay better connected to customers and their feedback,” he added.

Anthropic notes that as enterprise users adopt more plug-ins, Claude gains deeper insight into company workflows and how to improve them. At present, plug-ins are stored locally on a user’s device, though the company has indicated that a tool for organization-wide sharing is in development.

Cowork itself, released just about two weeks ago, is currently in a research preview phase, with a broader launch timeline still undetermined. For now, plug-ins will be accessible to all paying Claude customers.