Anthropic just made its Claude AI assistant considerably more useful for non-technical workers. The company is bringing its plugin system - previously available only in Claude Code - to Cowork, its two-week-old agentic platform designed for general business use. The move signals Anthropic's push deeper into enterprise automation, letting companies customize AI workflows for everything from marketing to legal review without needing coding expertise.
Anthropic is making a calculated bet that the future of enterprise AI isn't just about chatbots - it's about specialized automation that learns how your company actually works. The company's plugin system, which debuted in Claude Code for developers, is now available in Cowork, the agentic platform that launched earlier this month to bring AI assistance to non-coders across organizations.
The expansion comes at a critical moment. While OpenAI and Microsoft battle over enterprise AI integrations, Anthropic is quietly building something different - a customizable automation layer that doesn't require an engineering degree to deploy. According to the company's blog post, Cowork was designed to "take the benefits of its AI coding assistant Claude Code and transform it into a more general-use tool that non-coders could benefit from."
The plugin concept is deceptively simple. These specialized agents automate department-specific tasks - drafting marketing copy, flagging legal risks in contracts, or generating customer support responses. But the real power lies in customization. "You can tell Claude how you like work done, which tools and data to pull from, how to handle critical workflows, and what slash commands to expose so your team gets more consistent outcomes," Anthropic explains in its documentation.
Matt Piccolella, who works on Anthropic's product team, told TechCrunch that the company expects enterprises to create bespoke use-cases far beyond what it imagined. Anthropic open-sourced 11 of its own internal plugins as part of Friday's release, but noted that custom plugins are "easy to build, edit, and share" without deep technical knowledge.
