📌 TOPINDIATOURS Breaking ai: Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent tha

Anthropic released Cowork on Monday, a new AI agent capability that extends the power of its wildly successful Claude Code tool to non-technical users — and according to company insiders, the team built the entire feature in approximately a week and a half, largely using Claude Code itself.

The launch marks a major inflection point in the race to deliver practical AI agents to mainstream users, positioning Anthropic to compete not just with OpenAI and Google in conversational AI, but with Microsoft's Copilot in the burgeoning market for AI-powered productivity tools.

"Cowork lets you complete non-technical tasks much like how developers use Claude Code," the company announced via its official Claude account on X. The feature arrives as a research preview available exclusively to Claude Max subscribers — Anthropic's power-user tier priced between $100 and $200 per month — through the macOS desktop application.

For the past year, the industry narrative has focused on large language models that can write poetry or debug code. With Cowork, Anthropic is betting that the real enterprise value lies in an AI that can open a folder, read a messy pile of receipts, and generate a structured expense report without human hand-holding.

How developers using a coding tool for vacation research inspired Anthropic's latest product

The genesis of Cowork lies in Anthropic's recent success with the developer community. In late 2024, the company released Claude Code, a terminal-based tool that allowed software engineers to automate rote programming tasks. The tool was a hit, but Anthropic noticed a peculiar trend: users were forcing the coding tool to perform non-coding labor.

According to Boris Cherny, an engineer at Anthropic, the company observed users deploying the developer tool for an unexpectedly diverse array of tasks.

"Since we launched Claude Code, we saw people using it for all sorts of non-coding work: doing vacation research, building slide decks, cleaning up your email, cancelling subscriptions, recovering wedding photos from a hard drive, monitoring plant growth, controlling your oven," Cherny wrote on X. "These use cases are diverse and surprising — the reason is that the underlying Claude Agent is the best agent, and Opus 4.5 is the best model."

Recognizing this shadow usage, Anthropic effectively stripped the command-line complexity from their developer tool to create a consumer-friendly interface. In its blog post announcing the feature, Anthropic explained that developers "quickly began using it for almost everything else," which "prompted us to build Cowork: a simpler way for anyone — not just developers — to work with Claude in the very same way."

Inside the folder-based architecture that lets Claude read, edit, and create files on your computer

Unlike a standard chat interface where a user pastes text for analysis, Cowork requires a different level of trust and access. Users designate a specific folder on their local machine that Claude can access. Within that sandbox, the AI agent can read existing files, modify them, or create entirely new ones.

Anthropic offers several illustrative examples: reorganizing a cluttered downloads folder by sorting and intelligently renaming each file, generating a spreadsheet of expenses from a collection of receipt screenshots, or drafting a report from scattered notes across multiple documents.

"In Cowork, you give Claude access to a folder on your computer. Claude can then read, edit, or create files in that folder," the company explained on X. "Try it to create a spreadsheet from a pile of screenshots, or produce a first draft from scattered notes."

The architecture relies on what is known as an "agentic loop." When a user assigns a task, the AI does not merely generate a text response. Instead, it formulates a plan, executes steps in parallel, checks its own work, and asks for clarification if it hits a roadblock. Users can queue multiple tasks and let Claude process them simultaneously — a workflow Anthropic describes as feeling "much less like a back-and-forth and much more like leaving messages for a coworker."

The system is built on Anthropic's Claude Agent SDK, meaning it shares the same underlying architecture as Claude Code. Anthropic notes that Cowork "can take on many of the same tasks that Claude Code can handle, but in a more approachable form for non-coding tasks."

The recursive loop where AI builds AI: Claude Code reportedly wrote much of Claude Cowork

Perhaps the most remarkable detail surrounding Cowork's launch is the speed at which the tool was reportedly built — highlighting a recursive feedback loop where AI tools are being used to build better AI tools.

During a livestream hosted by Dan Shipper, Felix Rieseberg, an Anthropic employee, confirmed that the team built Cowork in approximately a week and a half.

Alex Volkov, who covers AI developments, expressed surprise at the timeline: "Holy shit Anthropic built 'Cowork' in the last… week and a half?!"

This prompted immediate speculation about how much of Cowork was itself built by Claude Code. Simon Smith, EVP of Generative AI at Klick Health, put it bluntly on X: "Claude Code wrote all of Claude Cowork. Can we all agree that we're in at least somewhat of a recursive improvement loop here?"

The implication is profound: Anthropic's AI coding agent may have substantially contributed to building its own non-technical sibling product. If true, this is one of the most visible examples yet of AI systems being used to accelerate their own development and expansion — a strategy that could widen the gap between AI labs that successfully deploy their own agents internally and those that do not.

Connectors, browser automation, and skills extend Cowork's reach beyond the local file system

Cowork doesn't operate in isolation. The feature integrates with Anthropic's existing ecosystem of connectors — tools that link Claude to external information sources and services such as Asana, Notion, PayPal, and other supported partners. Users who have configured these connections in the standard Claude interface can leverage them within Cowork sessions.

Additionally, Cowork can pair with Claude in Chrome, Anthropic's browser…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: AI Surveillance Systems Are Causing a Staggering Number of

These days, AI surveillance systems are everywhere. They’re watching our roads, tracking our purchases at the grocery store, and even monitoring school bathrooms.

Yet those systems come with a harmful catch — they’re a little too good at flagging bad behavior, leading to a staggering number of arrests and involuntary detentions.

New reporting by the Milwaukee Independent found that schools deploying surveillance systems to watch for online chatter referencing violence have logged an astonishing number of positive hits. Many of them are obviously not actionable threats, though they can lead to involuntary detention all the same.

In one school district in Lawrence, Kansas, for example, an online safety monitoring tool called Gaggle flagged over 1,200 online incidents over a 10-month period. Yet two thirds of those alerts were nonissues, the Independent found.

While many false positives can be waved away, schools in states with zero-tolerance reporting laws like Tennessee or Florida are required to inform police officials about cases where students hint at violence in any form.

In Florida’s Polk County School District — where Gaggle flagged some 500 students over four years — this meant that at least 72 kids so far have been arrested or hospitalized involuntarily under the state’s Baker Act.

“A really high number of children who experience involuntary examination remember it as a really traumatic and damaging experience — not something that helps them with their mental health care,” Sam Boyd, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Independent.

Many of those students don’t even realize their emails, online chats, and Google searches on school equipment are being monitored, let alone that they’ve done anything wrong. Tennessee mother Lesley Mathis, for example, told the Independent her eighth-grade daughter was arrested, interrogated, strip-searched, and held in jail for a night, over some teasing online.

Specifically, the student’s friends had heckled her about her “Mexican” complexion, even though she has a different ancestry. “On Thursday we kill all the Mexico’s [sic],” the eighth-grader quipped back.

Those comments are obviously very nasty — but it was clearly a bit of eighth-grade immaturity boiling over, not an actionable threat.

“It made me feel like, is this the America we live in?” Mathis said. “And it was this stupid, stupid technology that is just going through picking up random words and not looking at context.”

In the United States, studies show that youth who experience juvenile detention — even for short periods of time, like in pre-trial custody — experience worse development outcomes later in life compared to their peers. These include higher rates of adult incarceration, lower rates of full-time employment, and poorer health during adulthood.

Still, some school administrators feel that’s a risk worth taking — though there’s little evidence suggesting surveillance tech is actually lowering the levels of violence in American schools. As Lawrence school board member Anne Costello said in a 2024 board meeting: “Sometimes you have to look at the trade for the greater good.”

More on surveillance: Police Admit AI Surveillance Panopticon Still Has Issues With “Some Demographic Groups”

The post AI Surveillance Systems Are Causing a Staggering Number of Wrongful Arrests appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com