Anthropic merges Claude chat and Cowork memory by default

Anthropic turned on shared memory between Claude's chat and Cowork surfaces by default, including for the Free tier, according to Anthropic's August 25 post. That's the first time cross-surface memory has reached a free tier, letting context from a casual chat carry straight into a paid Cowork session.

Context learned in one surface carries into the other, and memory updates during a conversation instead of getting summarized afterward. It shows up in settings as file-based topic files users can read, edit or delete, with corrections propagating forward. Health, beliefs and ethnicity stay excluded unless a user opts in. Social Security numbers, criminal records and immigration status are never stored. Team and Enterprise admins can turn availability off; everyone else gets it on by default.

The announcement doesn't cover what happens to Cowork artifacts already live. A user says the merge broke every artifact they had published, per a Reddit thread. Recovery takes three steps. Share the artifact, accept a Republish prompt that produces a Local version, then republish again on resharing. After that, the artifact works across both surfaces, and the MCP and connector data bridges carry over. None of it appears in Anthropic's release notes.

If you have Cowork artifacts live anywhere, check them now.