Claude Cowork Now Supports Plugins

Anthropic announced today that Claude Cowork now supports the powerful plugin extension-bundle format that has been available for some time in Claude Code. This is a significant step forward in making Cowork a true power tool for those with zero interest in learning to use Claude Code, individuals some might call normies.

Anthropic also released a collection of knowledge work plugins for Cowork that show off just what’s possible:

As I wrote recently, Claude Code plugins can include skills as well as:

/commands, agents, hooks, MCP servers, and Language Server Protocol (LSP) servers

Anthropic’s initial batch of Cowork plugins consist primarily of skills, commands, and connector (MCP) definitions. Anthropic’s work here is impressive; the skills and commands are superbly crafted. Less prominently mentioned, but very impressive to me, is Anthropic’s work to enable plugin customization. For example, these plugins often include placeholders for aspects of their configuration that will vary from one organization to the next: ~~chat for chat platforms, ~~email for email systems, ~~cloud storage for cloud storage platforms, etc. These placeholders pair with a slick plugin customizer that walks you through custom-fitting the plugin to your organization.

These releases should help answer the question, “So what’s Cowork good for?”