Claude no longer makes you choose between chat and work: Anthropic folded Cowork into the main chat

Previously, you chose a door. You went to chat to talk, and to Cowork to delegate work. Now there is one door: you describe the task in words, and Claude picks the tool itself.

What you need to do to switch

You don't need to install anything. Unified Claude arrives automatically on claude.ai and in desktop and mobile apps. The rollout happens in waves by account. Paid plans get the new experience first: Pro from $17 per month with annual billing and Max from $100, followed by Team and Free.

There is no way back. Once you get the new experience, separate Chat and Cowork cannot be restored. Everything you have built moves over intact: chats, tasks, projects, artifacts, connectors, skills, and settings work as before.

That same day, Anthropic opened the Claude Docs and Claude Slides beta to paid plans. Slides download as PowerPoint and PDF, documents export to Google Docs and Word, and Claude Design works directly within the conversation.

What will stop working

Some familiar features will break after the switch. "Add from GitHub" no longer works, conversation branching has been removed, and search cannot find old Cowork tasks. Incognito chats open in the old mode, without file creation or code execution, and Dispatch is unavailable to new users.

Claude Code is unaffected by the merger. It remains a separate product for the terminal and IDE.

Limits will be used up faster. According to a Stanford Digital Economy Lab measurement, an agentic task consumes about 1000 times more tokens than ordinary chat reasoning. If simple prompts are routed through agentic machinery by default, the monthly limit will be exhausted sooner.

Enterprise accounts will switch later: Anthropic promises to notify admins at least 30 days in advance.