Anthropic adds customizable plug-ins to Cowork for repeatable enterprise workflows

Anthropic is expanding Cowork, its research-preview workspace product, with plug-ins that let companies package “how work gets done” into reusable, department-specific automations powered by AI.

Cowork plug-ins bring Claude Code-style automation to non-coders

Plug-ins are essentially configurable mini-agents: an enterprise can define instructions, connect approved tools and data sources, and expose slash commands so coworkers run the same workflow consistently. Instead of each team member prompting from scratch, a plug-in can codify best practices for tasks like drafting marketing copy, flagging risk in legal documents, or generating customer support responses.

Anthropic says the goal is repeatability: teams can specify which resources Claude should pull from and how to handle critical steps in a workflow, improving consistency across outputs. Anthropic product lead Matt Piccolella told TechCrunch that the company expects enterprises to build bespoke plug-ins for their own processes, and that custom versions should be “easy to build, edit, and share” without deep technical expertise.

Enterprise workflow standardization, with sharing still catching up

Plug-ins have existed inside Claude Code for some time, and this update primarily ports that capability into Cowork with a more UI-centric setup aimed at broader adoption. Anthropic also open-sourced 11 internal plug-ins as starting points, and documentation for the plug-in system is available at code.claude.com/docs/en/plugins.

Early internal traction is showing up in functions like sales and data analysis, where speed matters but quality control and context are often fragmented across tools. Anthropic frames this as a compounding advantage: the more plug-ins a company uses, the more Claude can learn an organization’s preferred workflows and optimize around them.

For now, plug-ins are saved locally on a user’s machine, with an organization-wide sharing feature “on the way,” according to Anthropic. Plug-ins are available to paying Claude customers while Cowork remains in research preview, and Anthropic has not shared a timeline for a broader Cowork release.