Claude Cowork arrives in Chrome with skills and plugins
Anthropic's agentic workspace just got a browser home: the Chrome extension that used to read pages for you can now run a full Cowork session in its side panel, skills and plugins included.
Anthropic's Cowork agent now runs inside the Chrome extension's side panel, bringing skills, plugins, and connectors into the browser for the first time. Until now, Claude in Chrome could read the page you were on, click, type, and fill forms — fine for research, but the work stopped at the tab. With this update, a full Cowork session lives in the panel: Claude handles the research on the page, and Cowork turns it into finished deliverables — Excel files, PowerPoint decks, reports — with no extra setup. Anthropic's suggested workflows include pulling metrics from analytics dashboards, organizing Google Drive, and logging sales calls into Salesforce. Sessions are tied to your account rather than your device, so a task started in the browser follows you to the desktop app, and the update is live now for all paid plans through the Chrome Web Store.
The move matters for two reasons. First, the skills-and-plugins ecosystem Anthropic has been building around Cowork is no longer desktop-only — the same extensions that power the agent on your machine now work wherever you open Chrome, which is exactly how a productivity agent wins default status. Second, it parks a genuinely capable agent inside the page at a moment when browser-based agents are the industry's live battleground. Anthropic is keeping the guardrails visible: Claude asks for confirmation before any purchase, and the company still warns about hidden instructions on websites — the prompt-injection problem that makes every page a potential attack surface. Its advice: don't point it at banking or health data. That caveat is the honest acknowledgment that a browser agent operates in hostile territory, and it's the reason this ships as a workspace tool with training wheels rather than a free-roaming web agent.
Cowork in Chrome is less a new product than a statement of where Anthropic thinks agent work happens: on the page, next to the actual work, with the safety rails drawn in.
What to watch: whether skills built for the desktop Cowork transfer to browser sessions unchanged — and how the majors' browser-agent bets converge from here.
Would you let an agent confirm purchases on your behalf in the browser, or is that one click too many? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: The Decoder · 9to5Mac · The New Stack
