📌 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: The Average American Would Pay $49 Per Month to Drink Recy

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Similarly, the water in your toilet bowl could be another person’s drink — after it’s rigorously filtered and becomes so pure that treatment facilities actually need to manually add minerals back into the water so it doesn’t, dare we say, flush important nutrients out of your own system.

Icky as it may sound on paper, recycled sewage or waste water may be the next game changer for water conservation, with many cities across the US already depending on these systems. 

And encouragingly, a new study highlighted by Grist shows the public is open to the idea of drinking water recycled from their own sewage. In a survey of small communities of fewer than 10,000 people published in the journal Water Resources Research, residents said they’d be willing to pay an average of $49 per month to have access to reused water. And hey, astronauts do it — so why shouldn’t the rest of us get access as well?

“I do think it is a bipartisan issue,” coauthor Todd Guilfoos, an economist at the University of Rhode Island, told Grist. “It’s often just cheaper than some of the other available solutions.”

In a nutshell, wastewater recycling works by first physically filtering the water, then subjecting it to reverse osmosis, and finally purifying it with ultraviolet light. It’s so effective that Nevada already reuses 85 percent of its water, another recent study cited by Grist found. Many cities already treat their sewage so it can be released into the ocean, but this method goes a step further to ensure the water’s safe for human consumption. That way, what was once your tap water becomes tap water again, instead of permanently becoming lost to the briny depths.

So why aren’t we using this everywhere? For one, the upfront cost of building the treatment facilities is steep. $49 per month might be enough for operating a reuse system, Guilfoos said, but “that doesn’t include what it would cost to actually build whatever water reuse infrastructure that you would need.” 

Smaller municipalities would have to turn to state and federal grants to break ground, he suggested. And it’s these smaller communities, especially in agricultural regions, that could massively benefit from wastewater reuse, as they often have no alternatives but to ration water once supplies run low. Soaring temperatures brought by climate change has also exacerbated droughts across the US, forcing rural towns to drain their aquifers, a process that also causes the ground above to sink over time.

But while there’re still material concerns and obstacles in the way, at the very least, it does seem to getting some traction with the American people.

“There’s a visceral reaction to drinking reused water, particularly reused wastewater, that’s totally understandable,” Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley, who wasn’t involved in the research, told Grist. “But over time, that has faded as the notion of reusing water to augment water supplies, including for drinking water, has become increasingly legitimized.”

More on the environment: Scientists Find That Igniting Oil Spills to Create Fire Tornadoes Might Actually Be Good for the Oceans

The post The Average American Would Pay $49 Per Month to Drink Recycled Toilet Water, Study Finds appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com