Anthropic merges chat and Cowork into one Claude

Anthropic is folding Claude Cowork into the regular Claude chat interface, per Simon Willison's writeup. Pro and Max users get one Claude across web, desktop, and mobile instead of choosing between a chat window and a Cowork session.

The pitch is a single agent that handles a quick question and a long-running task that keeps working after you close the laptop. That closes a real gap for anyone who's had a Cowork job finish while the chat tab sat idle.

What the announcement doesn't cover is Claude Code's place in this lineup. That's the exact distinction practitioners found confusing.

The more concrete problem showed up fast. A post in r/ClaudeAI flags that the merged interface has no conversation branching. Branching let you fork a long chat at any prior message and try a different direction without losing the original thread. A lot of people used Claude that way for anything with more than one plausible path forward.

Restarting a chat from scratch to try an alternative isn't the same as forking one. Nothing in the announcement says branching is coming back.