Cowork went GA April 2026 as Anthropic's desktop agent for knowledge workers — finance, ops, legal, analyst teams — while Claude Code is for engineering and Claude.ai is for ad-hoc chat. A per-department routing table with seat-cost maths: most companies should buy Cowork by default and reserve Claude Code seats for engineering.
This piece is being expanded into a full long-form article in the coming weeks. We publish each insight once the engagement it draws from has settled enough that we can name the trade-offs honestly — not while a pattern is still proving itself in production.
Field notes ship when the engagement they came from has stopped surprising us, not before.
Want the long-form version when it lands? Or want to skip ahead and talk through the same questions for your own company?