Anthropic brings agentic plug-ins to Cowork

Earlier this month, Anthropic introduced Cowork, a new agentic product designed to extend the capabilities of its AI coding assistant, Claude Code, into a broader, valuable tool to developers and others. Now, the company is expanding Cowork’s functionality by introducing plug-ins, a feature aimed squarely at enterprise users.

Plug-ins are designed to automate specialized tasks across teams within the organization. Whether it’s generating marketing copy, reviewing legal documents for potential risks, or helping customer support teams draft responses, the goal is to use agentic automation to streamline work in a more focused and consistent way.

According to Anthropic, plug-ins allow organizations to define how Claude should do work, including which tools and data sources to use, how critical workflows should be handled, and which slash commands should be available. The result, the company says, is more predictable and standardized outcomes across teams.

Matt Piccolella, a member of Anthropic’s product team, told TechCrunch that plug-ins are designed to be highly customizable. He said Anthropic expects enterprise customers to develop their own tailored plug-ins to suit specific internal needs. As part of Friday’s release, the company open-sourced 11 plug-ins it uses internally, emphasizing that custom plug-ins are “easy to build, edit, and share,” even for users without deep technical backgrounds.

Plug-ins themselves are not entirely new to Anthropic’s ecosystem. They have been available within Claude Code for some time. Bringing them into Cowork is meant to make the same functionality accessible to a broader range of users through a more user-friendly, interface-driven experience. “What we’re really doing with this launch is bringing them to Cowork and giving them that UI-centric approach so the maximum number of people can use them,” Piccolella said.

Within Anthropic, plug-ins have already shown value in several departments. Piccolella highlighted data analysis and sales as two areas where the tools have proven especially useful. In sales, he said, plug-ins have helped both dedicated sales staff and employees in sales-adjacent roles stay more closely connected to customers and customer feedback.

Anthropic says that as enterprise users rely more heavily on plug-ins, Claude becomes increasingly familiar with an organization’s workflows, allowing it to optimize more effectively over time. At present, plug-ins are stored locally on a user’s machine, though the company noted that a feature enabling organization-wide use is currently in development.

Cowork, which launched roughly two weeks ago, is still in a research preview phase, and Anthropic has not yet indicated when a broader release might occur. For now, the company says plug-ins will be available to all paying Claude customers.