Anthropic Extends Claude Cowork to iPhone, iPad, and Web

The interesting piece of this week's Anthropic update isn't the mobile app itself, it's what Anthropic is asking mobile to do. Claude Cowork, the feature that lets Claude push through a multi-step task across your files and connected tools, is expanding to iPhone, iPad, Android, and claude.ai as a beta, 9to5Mac's Zac Hall reports. Access starts with Claude Max subscribers and widens to other paid tiers over the coming weeks.

The pitch is straightforward. Anthropic describes Cowork as Claude working "across your files, calendar, email, messaging app, the web, and connected tools until the job is done." Tasks are meant to persist across devices, keep running in the background in the cloud even when no device is online, and pause for user approval before any output is finalized. Chat and Cowork are also being merged into a single view on web and desktop rather than living in separate tabs.

Two pricing signals are worth noticing. Anthropic has doubled Cowork usage limits through August 5, which reads like a trial window designed to get subscribers into the habit before caps snap back. And Claude Fable 5 access, originally set to change earlier in the month, will remain available across paid plans through July 12, with each user able to spend up to 50% of their weekly usage limit on the model before switching to usage credits or other models.

The honest caveat is what the reporting doesn't spell out. The write-up describes the shape of the rollout but not the details a heavier user would want: the actual usage ceiling once the doubled window ends, which third-party connectors are supported on mobile versus desktop, or what a Fable 5 credit costs once you've burned through your 50% allowance. The approval model is described but not quantified either, so how often a background task actually stops to ask you something is still an open question.

The upside is clear enough for the people this is aimed at. If you've been treating Claude as a chat assistant and holding off on the agentic pieces because you didn't want to sit at a desktop watching it work, being able to kick a task off from a phone and check back in later is the missing piece. Whether that graduates from neat to load-bearing is the story to watch through August.