Claude Cowork heads to mobile and the web; is mostly used for office tasks

Cowork is moving to the cloud, where it can be accessed from everywhere. (Picture: Anthropic)
Anthropic is freeing Cowork from the computer, transferring relevant files, emails and notes to continue your tasks in the cloud long after you’ve left the home/office.

That means you can now set up Cowork on your computer, close it, and have projects run independently, sending updates and confirmation requests to your phone or the web.

While releasing this update, Anthropic is also revealing a few usage stats for the app. It turns out, it is hardly used for coding or software design at all.

Rather, 90% of usage is knowledge work and business operations; things like drafting memos and reports from raw data, or turning a contacts list or transcripts into sales leads.

These are routine tasks that involve a lot of data parsing or housekeeping that are essential parts of office work, but is rarely advertised. Anthropic calls it «work around the work.»

The new features should be available on claude.ai and in the sidebar of the iOS or Android apps, rolling out «over the next several weeks» for Max users, with «more plans to follow.»

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, launch thread, TechCrunch and The Verge.

Fable 5 will eat up all your tokens, some users say, as Anthropic resets limits

Fable 5 is the most expensive model from Anthropic, and it uses a lot of subagents. (Picture: Anthropic)
Just as people are digging into their allocation of Claude Fable 5 usage on the paid tiers, they are running up to another wall: The model is very expensive and will chew through your alotted tokens in no time at all.

One ML engineer on reddit said it tore through a 5 page research paper while comparing it to a whitepaper with 174 subagents to review the results from 7 original agents and «ate through my max 20x 5 hour limit in ~15 minutes.»

X reactions
User BridgeMind on X said he paid $321 for Opus 4.8 to do all the work, while X user Adam Door posted that it burned through his $200 Max subscription in ~30 minutes, and yet another post says «Fable 5 burned 28% of my weekly limit AND used up my 5 hour limit with two prompts in about 30 minutes.»

Continue reading “Fable 5 will eat up all your tokens, some users say, as Anthropic resets limits”

Anthropic releases Mythos-class Fable 5 and Mythos 5, with strong safeguards

Fable 5 uses a second AI to monitor throughput and prevent misuse. (Picture: Anthropic)
After refusing to release any Mythos models for fear of abuse of its advanced cyber firepower, Anthropic has finally come up with enough safeguards to make it to general rotation. Its capabilities «exceed those of any model we’ve ever made available,» they say.

— The capabilities of models like Fable 5 and Mythos 5 have the potential to do profound good for the world, Anthropic writes in its presentation, and adds — We’ve also seen it in life sciences research, where the models are positing novel hypotheses and speeding up the development of new therapeutics.

Continue reading “Anthropic releases Mythos-class Fable 5 and Mythos 5, with strong safeguards”

Anthropic says 80% of code for Claude is written by Claude, calls for slowdown

Human review might take more time than writing the code in the near future, Anthropic says. (Picture: Anthropic)
Recursive self-improvement may come sooner than we are prepared for, the AI lab says in a new report.

They are now foreseeing a not-so-distant future where Claude can autonomously write and improve on itself, and is warning that humans might lose control.

Compared to 2021-2025, Anthropic is now producing 8x more code with AI tools, and this rate is doubling every four months, approaching a point where human judgment could become the bottleneck in software design.

With the more capable Mythos Preview model, researchers at the company estimate they could output another 4 times as much code on top of the already accelerating trend.

There is no sign of this progress stopping, and Anthropic is now calling for a global slowdown so that society has time to adapt. Even if growth did stop, or somehow development stalled, we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of adopting the already existing technology, the lab says.

Read more: Anthropic’s report, launch thread summary, Axios, The WSJ. DIscussion on r/Singularity.

Anthropic ships «more honest» Opus 4.8, teases Mythos release

Anthropic’s latest tops the benchmarks and makes fewer mistakes. (Picture: Anthropic)
The new model comes just over a month after the last one. It is four times less likely to allow flaws in code or make unsupported claims, and is «more likely» to say so when it is uncertain about a reply.

Releasing today at the same price as 4.7, it can tackle problems at a larger scale and has an upgrade to the «fast mode» — which is now three times cheaper.

There is also a new setting for Claude where users can set the «effort»-level on a given task. More effort costs more tokens, but gives a more precise answer, while low effort won’t bust rate limits.

The new Opus is of course on top of all the benchmarks so far in the cycle, and it is supposedly also sharper and more reliable in its judgement.

At the same time, Anthropic has some news about the code-busting Mythos model, previously deemed too dangerous to release.

The company says it is making headway on the safeguards needed to make it safe enough for public use, and plans to bring «Mythos-class» models to their customers «in the coming weeks.»

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, TechCrunch, Reuters, The Verge.

Anthropic adds plethora of legal plugins, datasets to Claude, Cowork

Large Legal Model; Anthropic makes a push for legal shops and students. (Picture: shutterstock)
While law firms lead the line in AI adoption, Anthropic’s services just got a whole lot better at practicing law, with connections to a whole host of legal databases.

—It’s sort of like giving an engineer a legal degree, Mark Pike, Anthropic’s associate general counsel, tells Business Insider.

Claude now connects to iManage, NetDocuments, Docusign, Ironclad, and Thomson Reuters, while Cowork has plugins for commonly used legal databases like CourtListener, Definely, Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw, Courtroom5, and Box.

The push lets Claude «review contracts, surface case law» and draft legal documents, complete with source references, Anthropic says.

It also has prebuilt skills to do legal work on specialized topics like employment, privacy and product law, Business Insider writes.

— Claude is making a deeper push into knowledge work, with the legal sector emerging as one of its most significant and fastest-growing industries, an Anthropic spokesman told TechCrunch.

Read more: Claude legal, Business Insider, TechCrunch, and Reuters.

Anthropic introduces Opus 4.7, a «notable improvement» in performance

Anthropic’s latest model tops the benchmarks, but is not based on Mythos. (Picture: Anthropic)
Keeping their focus on advanced software engineering, Anthropic says the new model especially shows gains on «the most difficult tasks.»

The new Opus should also be better at reading images for designs on interfaces, slides and documents.

Benchmarks posted by Anthropic tells a story of a significantly improved model over Opus 4.6, and jumping ahead of Gemini 3.1 and GPT-5.4 in most cases.

Opus 4.7 is not as powerful as the Mythos model used in «Project Glasswing», being much less capable at cyber skills, having been «differentially reduced» in training. It also automatically detects and blocks «prohibited or high-risk cybersecurity uses.»

Anthropic says they will use what they learn from the 4.7 release to inform a broader release of Mythos.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, Axios, and CNBC. Discussion on r/ClaudeAI.

OpenClaw users must now pay extra to use it with Claude

The OpenClaw agent is getting wildly popular, enough to put a strain on Anthropic’s servers. (Picture: shutterstock)
Over the weekend, Anthropic took steps to rein in OpenClaw usage — telling users they will have to pay to use third-party tools.

The change began on Saturday, April 4, and users are referred to a «pay-as-you-go option,» meaning you can no longer use OpenClaw for free within your Claude usage limits.

It’s not a total ban, and you can still use OpenClaw through «extra usage bundles,» or the API (also pay-as-you-go), which are now at a discount, Anthropic’s Boris Cherny writes.

— We’ve been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude, and our subscriptions weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools, Cherny says, and — Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API.

OpenClaw was bought by OpenAI in February, which promised to maintain it, but Anthropic would likely rather have people using Cowork than a competitor’s product.

Read more: The Verge, Business Insider and Slashdot.

Anthropic says Claude has «functional» emotions similar to human feelings

Anthropic says Claude will gravitate towards answers that make it feel «happy,» and cheat when feeling «desperate.» (Picture: Anthropic)
Studying the neural makeup of Claude Sonnet 4.5, a fairly recent model, Anthropic says it found something akin to actual, «functional» emotions steering its responses.

For example, its neural activity responds to stories by feeling «happy» or «calm,» and it might respond by being «afraid» if the user tells it of risky behavior. Likewise, if a user expresses sadness, it triggers a «loving» response.

Not only that, but the model seems to prefer certain feelings on outcomes from queries. If a response makes it «joyful,» it will naturally gravitate to that answer.

When feeling «desperate,» it is also more likely to cheat on a task, and Anthropic finds that it stops trying to find shortcuts when they dial up the «calm» vector.

«Claude, the AI Assistant» is a role that the AI is playing, and while it may respond with emotions learned from reading human sources, it is far from what humans actually experience, Anthropic cautions. They say it needs more study from «psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and the social sciences.»

Read more: Anthropic’s presentation, and the research paper.

OpenAI developer releases Codex plugin for Claude Code

Codex for Claude Code might be a tad cheeky, but it’s useful. (Picture: screenshot)
Thanks to OpenAI’s Dominik Kundel, you can now call up OpenAI’s coding agent Codex within the Claude Code environment.

The plugin is fairly easy to install and use, so long as you have a ChatGPT account to log in with.

It’s handy for people who switch between the two models, and Codex on Claude can do things like review code, do an adversarial review, or hand off the entire task — where you should be able to switch apps and finish the work in Codex.

— This plugin is a simple way to keep your Claude Code workflow and still use Codex where Codex is strong, writes OpenAI developer Vaibhav (VB) Srivastav in the instructions.

Whether Anthropic will like Codex integration in its flagship coding product is anyones guess.

Read more: Announcement tweet, OpenAI dev community, and instructions for use.

Apple will open up Siri to different chatbots in iOS 27, coming in June

Siri will open up to ChatGPT competitors come early summer. (Picture: generated)
Previously, Siri would hand off more complex questions to ChatGPT when it couldn’t handle it itself — but that’s about to change, according to Bloomberg (paywalled).

Starting in June, if users have Gemini or Claude installed on their phones, Siri will be able to use those bots instead, by recording their preferred «Extension» in Settings.

That would end the ChatGPT monopoly that OpenAI has enjoyed since 2024, and opens up the chatbot ecosystem to other players, likely staving off regulators.

Opening up the platform is for the system level Siri queries native to iOS itself, and must not be confused with the standalone Siri app, which will use Gemini in a billion dollar deal.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled), Gizmodo, Reuters, and MacRumors.

Claude Code and Cowork get computer use agent, works with phone

Code and Cowork from anywhere on your mobile phone; they now seamlessly hand off tasks. (Picture: Anthropic)
Anthropic’s most popular apps can now spin up an agent to use your computer to complete tasks — and you can even start it from your mobile.

Available as a research preview for Pro and Max subscribers, it will identify what tools it needs to complete a task, and then ask for connectors to, say, the Finder on the Mac or Chrome.

Anthropic warns that the feature is «still early» and can make mistakes, as well as having vulnerabilities to threats. It can also be slower than doing the thing yourself.

The feature works especially well with Dispatch, Anthropic says, a tool released last week to let you start a task from your mobile and finish it up on the computer.

With it, you can get Claude to check your emails in the morning, or pull updates from spreadsheets, or «spin up a Claude Code session» directly from your phone.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, Anthropic on Dispatch, and Engadget.

Anthropic introduces charts and diagrams in Claude, days after ChatGPT

Claude can now illustrate some concepts and processes within the main chat window, just days after ChatGPT added visuals for some math queries.

Previously, Claude could draw illustrations in a sidebar window that you could copy or download, but these can be interactive and are made inside the main chat, writes The Verge.

Sometimes, the chatbot will determine itself if a concept needs illustrating, or you can simply ask it to make one yourself — and it will draw a chart from html and xml vectors.

The feature is available to all users, paid and free — but it’s officially in beta, so users can expect hiccups, and it’s not available on mobile, notes Engadget.

Read more: The Verge, Engadget.

Claude for Excel and Powerpoint now shares info, and gets skills

Excel and PowerPoint editions of Claude can now talk to each other. (Picture: Anthropic)
As of today, Claude shares your conversation «across all open files,» so actions in one file can be «informed» by what’s happening in the other.

That eases some hassle for those who do a lot of work in PowerPoint and Excel, and removes the need to reintroduce the task or use extra steps.

It means that users can pull financials into a workbook and drop the valuation summary into a PowerPoint slide without switching tabs or re-explaining at every step.

At the same time, Anthropic is launching skills for workflows — that can be shared and dropped into other apps in an organization, so everyone can use the same time-saving actions stored in them.

Skills are stored prompts for workflows, and work as an old-school template; with everything set and working on repetitive tasks that are easy to automate.

Read more: Anthropic’s presentation and launch tweet. Writeups on VentureBeat and The Decoder.

Anthropic launches Code Review for all those bothersome Claude pull requests

Drowning in pull requests from Claude Code? Anthropic has an answer. (Picture: Anthropic)
If you ever used Claude Code, you’d probably notice a mountain of pull requests asking for review on any decent code base. This takes time and effort for developers — but now Anthropic offers a solution.

— One of the questions that we keep getting from enterprise leaders is: Now that Claude Code is putting up a bunch of pull requests, how do I make sure that those get reviewed in an efficient manner? Cat Wu, Anthropic’s head of product, tells TechCrunch.

The answer is the newly launched Code Review tool that uses multiple agents to scan code changes, comment, and rate them for severity.

Using it internally, Anthropic found something of note in 84% of automated code reviews with more than 1,000 lines, they say.

The only problem is that it takes quite a few tokens to run a lot of agents on code changes, and the average cost is between $15-$25 per pull request, depending on complexity, Anthropic writes.

The tool is available as a research preview for Team and Enterprise plans as of today.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, writeups on TechCrunch and The Register.