Anthropic merges Claude Chat and Cowork for Pro and Max users

• Claude Chat and Cowork are becoming one product surface for Pro and Max subscribers, with the merger announcement saying the rollout spans web, desktop, and mobile over the next few weeks.
• Claude now routes a prompt between a quick answer, deeper agentic work, and an output type, as the routing announcement describes, while users can still stop, redirect, or adjust its effort.
• Docs, Slides, and Design are now available from a conversation, where the Docs and Slides announcement shows a one-pager becoming a deck and a visual without changing tools.
• Claude Code joins the artifact system too: ClaudeDevs' post says it can generate repo-grounded docs, slides, and design work that teams can share.

A single conversation can yield a report and a matching five-slide deck, according to Anthropic's official walkthrough. Inside Claude Code, ClaudeDevs' post says a design-review deck or UI mockup can be grounded in the repository's actual files and RFCs.

Anthropic built Cowork as a place for larger tasks and Design for visual work. Its launch post says the split made users decide where a job belonged and prevented work started in one surface from carrying into another.

The new behavior makes the prompt the router. Claude chooses whether to answer quickly or run deeper agentic work, and selects the output that fits, while existing context, skills, and connectors are available from the same conversation.

The revamped Artifacts platform has three output types:

• Docs: Claude drafts in the conversation, asks clarifying questions, and leaves comments explaining its choices, according to the Claude Docs guide.
• Slides: presentations can be opened and edited in Claude, then exported as PowerPoint or PDF, as the artifact announcement says.
• Design: users can edit an element directly or select and move it, as the editing-controls announcement demonstrates.

All three are artifacts rather than standalone starting points, and Anthropic says Design continues to work on its own as before.

The official example starts with a pipeline update, produces a report and five slides, and can be scheduled to repeat every Monday. It also places a phone in the loop: Claude can keep working while the user checks its progress away from the desk.

Anthropic exposes two check-in modes in its launch post:

• Default: Claude asks before taking an action.
• Background mode: Claude keeps working and checks in when something needs closer review; the user retains final approval.

The unified experience begins with Pro and Max on web, desktop, and mobile, with no feature flag to enable. Team and Free plans are slated to follow, while Enterprise administrators will receive at least 30 days' notice before their organizations change.

Cowork users keep their chats, projects, artifacts, connectors, and skills, according to the migration announcement. The rollout is gradual while Anthropic tunes speed and reliability, as the rollout note states.

Docs, Slides, and Design are beta features on paid plans. The Claude Docs guide says Docs is unavailable on Free, while the merged Chat and Cowork interface itself starts with Pro and Max.

The Claude Design documentation lists an intermittent collaboration bug: inline comments can disappear before Claude reads them. Its documented workaround is to paste the feedback directly into chat.

Claude Code can now create Docs and Slides as artifacts, making a path from a shared specification to implementation. In trq212's example, a team shares a spec document for feedback, then asks Claude to implement after it is ready.

The Code integration can use repository files and RFCs as input for design-review decks and UI mockups, and trq212 pointed to a new /design command in a reply about the command.