Anthropic PBC today rolled out an update to Claude Cowork that will enable users to extend its feature set with custom plugins.
Claude Cowork is an automation tool that the company introduced for its popular chatbot earlier this month. It can perform multistep tasks in file folders and the user’s browser. For example, a worker could have Claude Cowork automatically summarize a set of newly downloaded business documents.
Today’s update will enable users to personalize the tool by creating plugins. A plugin can include, among others, MCP integrations that give Claude Cowork access to external applications. A salesperson could build a plugin that enables Claude Cowork to pull lead data from a customer relationship management platform.
Plugins can also include sub-agents. Those are versions of Claude optimized for a specific task. Users can give a sub-agent data access permissions tailored to its target use case and system prompts that explain how the task should be carried out. A worker could, for example, instruct a sub-agent to render data visualizations with a specific design.
Users can also equip Claude Cowork with custom slash commands. Those are text-based shortcuts that make it possible to manually activate a user-created automation workflow.
Claude Code’s plugin creation wizard is itself a plugin. Customers can also access 10 other pre-packaged extensions built by the company. Most of them focus on department-specific use cases such as sales, marketing and accounting. There are also two general-purpose plugins designed to help users manage to-do items and perform research.
Anthropic plans to release an enhanced version of Claude Cowork’s plugin system in the coming weeks. The update will enable companies to create internal plugin catalogs for employees.
In conjunction with today’s automation enhancements, Anthropic revealed that NASA is among the organizations using Claude to speed up manual work for staffers. The space agency’s researchers recently used the chatbot to generate driving instructions for the Perseverance Mars rover. Anthropic says Claude cut the amount of time needed to complete the task by half.
Perseverance is deployed in a 29-mile-wide crater that contains rocks and other potential hazards. Before the car-sized rover drives to a new location, researchers must plot an obstacle-free course. NASA staff develop driving paths by analyzing images of Mars taken from space and footage collected by the rover’s onboard cameras.
According to Anthropic, Claude automatically analyzed Mars imagery to develop navigation guidance for Perseverance. It implemented the instructions in a NASA-developed programming syntax called Rover Markup Language. Last month, Perseverance used Claude’s guidance to navigate a 1,300-foot path through a field of rocks.
Image: Anthropic
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