Anthropic is merging Claude Cowork into chat and adding Claude Docs and Slides

Anthropic is folding Claude Cowork into the regular Claude chat, and the merged app gets two new tools for documents and slide decks, Claude Docs and Claude Slides. The catch is timing: Anthropic's September 16 announcement says the change is rolling out to Pro and Max plans first, over the coming weeks, with Team and Free plans to "follow soon".

In the redesigned Projects, Claude suggests work it can start as parallel threads. Image: Anthropic

Anthropic says there is nothing to switch on. The update reaches existing and new Pro and Max users in the Claude app on the web, desktop and mobile as the rollout progresses, so not every subscriber has it yet. Enterprise admins will hear from Anthropic at least 30 days before anything changes for their organisations.

Anthropic ends the choice between chat and Cowork

Cowork was built as a separate place for bigger jobs, and Claude Design as the place for visual work. Anthropic says users found it frustrating to decide where a task belonged, and that work started in one did not carry over to the other.

So the split goes. Claude now works out what a task needs, and what Cowork and Design can do is available from any conversation, with the context, skills and connectors a user has set up.

Existing Cowork users keep their chats, projects, artifacts, connectors and skills where they left them. Claude Design also keeps working on its own for anyone who uses it that way.

By default, Claude asks before it takes an action. Users can change that so it keeps working and checks in only when something needs a closer look. Anthropic says Claude keeps working on a handed-over job even after the laptop is closed.

Slides can leave Claude as PowerPoint or PDF

Ask for a document and, in Anthropic's words, "you and Claude write it together". Ask for a presentation and Claude drafts the slides, which can be edited directly, presented straight from Claude, or downloaded as PowerPoint or PDF.

Docs, Slides and Claude Design are all in beta on paid plans, and Enterprise admins decide when to turn them on. Anything made with the three tools lives at one shareable link that opens on a phone, and users can select an element to move it or tell Claude what to change.

Anthropic's example is a weekly report that Claude writes as a doc and turns into five slides from the same conversation, so the numbers in both match. The report can also be scheduled to run each week without a prompt. The announcement gives no change to prices or usage limits.

Projects turn into a manager for parallel threads

A day later, on September 17, Anthropic rebuilt Claude Projects around the same hand-it-over idea. Instead of a folder of files, a project now has a coordinator that "scopes the request, delegates the work, coordinates parallel threads, reviews the outputs, and assembles the finished result."

Each thread is a Claude Code cloud session working on its own branch and copy of a repository, so two threads touching the same code end in an ordinary merge conflict. Threads share a project memory that builds up over time, and a new library collects uploaded files and the artifacts Claude produces.

Access is narrow for now. The redesign is in beta for select Pro and Max subscribers who use cloud sessions in Claude Code and have no existing projects on the web or desktop, with a waitlist for other Pro and Max users. Anthropic says more Claude Code users on those plans get access over the coming week, with projects across the rest of Claude, and Team and Enterprise plans, after that.

Anthropic warns that projects "can reach usage limits faster", because every thread is a full Claude Code session. Anyone who has watched Claude Code token bills climb on a single session will want to check the per-project usage view before starting five threads at once.

Threads run only in the cloud for now. Anthropic says running them on a user's own machine, next to local tools and code, is "coming very soon", and existing projects on Pro and Max keep working as before until the rollout reaches chat and Cowork.