AI Is Moving Past Chatbots. Claude Cowork Shows What’s Next – TIME
Claude on a smart phone.Photo illustration by Cheng Xin — Getty Images
Updated: Jan 15, 2026 9:36 AM PT
AI Is Moving Beyond Chatbots. Claude Cowork Shows What Comes Next
by Nikita Ostrovsky
Claude on a smart phone.Photo illustration by Cheng Xin—Getty Images
The DNA file had been gathering dust in Pietro Schirano’s computer for years. Then, earlier this month, he gave it to Claude Code—an “agentic coding tool” developed by Anthropic—for analysis. “I’m attaching my raw DNA file from Ancestry DNA,” he told the tool.
The AI spawned copies of itself on Schirano’s computer, each one simulating an expert in a different part of the genome—one expert on cardiovascular disease, another on aging, a third on autoimmune disease. “There were a lot of things that resonated with my life,” says Schirano, who was an engineer at Anthropic prior to founding MagicPath, an AI product design startup. “I always thought that I could deal with caffeine better than all of my friends. It was always this inside joke: I can just drink seven espressos because I’m Italian.” Claude Code’s analysis revealed that Schirano does, in fact, have a gene that allows him to metabolize caffeine better than the average person, that he’s predisposed to Alzheimer’s, and suggested supplements to take based on his genetic profile.
Claude Code, released in February 2025, was Anthropic’s first successful attempt at building an AI agent—a system that takes actions on the user’s behalf, rather than merely conversing in a chat interface. Claude Code can access files and programs on a user’s computer, and even run “sub-agents” for specific tasks, such as those that analyzed different parts of Schirano’s genome. It has steadily accrued a devoted following of tinkerers using it to file their taxes, design knitting patterns, and even autonomously grow a tomato plant.
Yet most people have never heard of Claude Code. That’s because the primary way of accessing the tool is through a command line interface—the old-school computer terminal that went out of fashion among the general public some time in the last millennium. That obscurity might be about to change. On Monday, Anthropic announced Claude Cowork, which the company calls “Claude Code for the rest of your work.”
“It’s gonna blow a lot of people’s minds who are not coders,” says Martin DeVido, the developer behind the experiment using Claude Code to grow a tomato plant.
Claude Cowork aims to bring Claude Code’s agentic capabilities to a broader audience by supplying it with a friendlier user interface and hiding some of the complexity that has made Claude Code daunting to the uninitiated. The tool, initially available as a research preview for customers paying $100 a month for the Max plan, has “rough edges,” according to Felix Reiseberg, its lead engineer. One user found that the app gave her “scary error messages” and wouldn’t connect to her calendar.
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