Anthropic's Cowork gets plugins that turn Claude into a specialized assistant for knowledge workers

Anthropic has launched plugins for Cowork that turn Claude into a specialized assistant for sales, legal, finance, and other departments. Each plugin bundles skills, data connections, commands, and sub-agents. A sales plugin, for instance, hooks Claude into the company's CRM and knowledge base while adding commands for customer research and call follow-up.

Anthropic has open-sourced eleven plugins covering productivity, data analysis, marketing, and customer service. All components are stored as simple files, which the company says makes them easy to build and share via the Cowork interface or GitHub.

Plugin support is available as a research preview for paying Claude users. Plugins are stored locally for now, with company-wide management coming later. Cowork is Anthropic's desktop software for agentic knowledge work, though it still has fundamental cybersecurity issues.