📌 TOPINDIATOURS Hot ai: Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent that wor

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: Microbes may hitchhike across the solar system via asteroi

Microbes blasted off a planet by an asteroid strike may survive the journey to another world, including Earth, according to a new study from Johns Hopkins University.

Researchers tested whether a hardy bacterium could endure the crushing pressures generated when a space rock slams into a planet and ejects debris into space. The results suggest that life could survive the initial blast and potentially travel between planets embedded inside rock fragments.

The idea, known as lithopanspermia, proposes that life can spread through space via meteorites and planetary debris. Scientists already know that Martian meteorites have landed on Earth.

The question has been whether living organisms could endure the violent forces required to launch them off a planet in the first place.

To find out, the team recreated the intense shock pressures associated with an asteroid impact on Mars and measured whether microbes could survive.

Blasted off, still alive

The researchers chose Deinococcus radiodurans, a bacterium known for surviving extreme radiation, cold, dryness, and other harsh conditions.

It has a thick outer shell and strong DNA repair mechanisms, traits that could resemble hypothetical life on Mars.

“We do not yet know if there is life on Mars, but if there is, it is likely to have similar abilities,” said senior author K.T. Ramesh.

To simulate impact conditions, the team sandwiched the microbes between metal plates and fired a projectile at them using a gas gun. The projectile struck at speeds up to 300 mph, generating pressures between 1 and 3 gigapascals.

For comparison, pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is about 0.1 gigapascals. Even the lowest pressure in the experiment exceeded that by more than tenfold.

The bacteria survived nearly all tests at 1.4 gigapascals and about 60 percent at 2.4 gigapascals. At lower pressures, the cells showed no visible damage.

At higher pressures, some membranes ruptured, and internal structures were affected, but many microbes remained viable.

“We expected it to be dead at that first pressure,” said lead author Lily Zhao. “We started shooting it faster and faster. We kept trying to kill it, but it was really hard to kill.”

Rethinking planetary protection

When large asteroids strike Mars, some debris can experience pressures near 5 gigapascals, although not all fragments are subjected to the same forces. The new findings suggest that at least some microbes could survive a significant portion of that range.

“We have shown that it is possible for life to survive large-scale impact and ejection,” Zhao said. “What that means is that life can potentially move between planets. Maybe we’re Martians!”

The results could have implications for planetary protection policies. Space agencies impose strict contamination controls when sending spacecraft to Mars and when returning samples to Earth.

However, Mars ejecta may also reach its moons, such as Phobos, under lower pressures than those required to escape to Earth.

“We might need to be very careful about which planets we visit,” Ramesh said.

The team plans to test whether repeated impacts could select for even hardier microbes and whether other organisms, including fungi, can survive similar shocks.

The study was published in the journal PNAS Nexus.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com