Anthropic brings agentic plug-ins to Cowork

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

Behold, the plug-in.

The idea behind plug-ins is simple: They are designed to automate “specialized” tasks within a company’s various departments. Whether that function is drafting content for the marketing department, reviewing risks in documents for a firm’s legal team, or drafting responses for customer support, the plug-in is designed to use agentic automation to streamline work with a specialized focus.

The company says you can use plug-ins to “tell Claude how you like work done, which tools and data to pull from, how to handle critical workflows, and what slash commands to expose so your team gets more consistent outcomes.”

Matt Piccolella, who works on the product team at Anthropic, told TechCrunch that plug-ins are built to be customized and that the company expects enterprise users to create their very own bespoke use cases for them. Anthropic open sourced 11 of its in-house plug-ins as part of the release on Friday, but noted that custom plug-ins are “easy to build, edit, and share” and can be utilized without much technical expertise.

Plug-ins have already been available within Claude Code for some time, and their expansion into Cowork is merely designed to take that same utility and share it with different kinds of users. “Really, what we’re doing with this launch is just bringing them to Cowork and giving them that kind of user-friendly, UI-centric flavor that will allow the maximum number of people to use them,” Piccolella said.

Piccolella pointed to data analysis and sales as two departments within Anthropic where plug-ins have already shown promise. “Sales has been a really big one, both for our direct sales people, but then also just getting anybody who’s kind of sales adjacent, better connected to the customer and customer feedback and all of that,” he said.

Anthropic says that the more enterprise users utilize plug-ins, the more Claude knows about a company’s workflows and how to optimize them. Currently, plug-ins get saved locally to a user’s machine, although Anthropic says that an organization-wide sharing tool is on the way.

Cowork, which just released about two weeks ago, is currently in its research preview. It’s unclear when it will launch more widely. For the time being, plug-ins will be available to all paying Claude customers, Anthropic says.