Anthropic’s Claude Comes for Knowledge Work as Markets Freak Out

Anthropic is coming for knowledge work. Earlier this month, the debut of AI assistant Claude Cowork and the subsequent release of industry-specific plug-ins, such as Legal, made waves. Worried investors sent software stocks spiraling down, as the market tried (and is still trying) to contend with a possible major AI disruption to the way we work.

On Tuesday, Anthropic announced Cowork plugins targeting even more lines of work, giving organizations the ability to build their own, customized private plugins from scratch with the help of Claude.

Using Claude Cowork’s pre-built plug-ins, companies can now make AI agents to theoretically automate work across HR, design, engineering, operations, financial analysis, investment banking, equity research, private equity, and more.

The AI agents can also now connect to Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, DocuSign, FactSet, LegalZoom, WordPress, and other apps. On top of the Cowork announcements, Anthropic also shared that Claude can now edit files and pass context between Cowork, Excel, and PowerPoint, so if you are using it on one document, it will remember what you’re working on when you switch to another.

“In 2025, Claude transformed how developers work, and in 2026, it will do the same for knowledge work,†Anthropic’s head of Americas Kate Jensen said in a briefing on Tuesday.

That’s roughly in line with what Wall Street seems to believe, as well. Following an AI thought experiment published Sunday on Substack detailing how AI can cause widespread annihilation of white-collar work and skyrocketing unemployment, the market went into a sell frenzy.

“The impact of this technology on the economy and on the labor market more broadly will be in some sense shaped by whether tasks become automated or whether they augment how we do our work,†Anthropic head of economics Peter McCrory said in the briefing. “An interesting thing that we see in the data when we turn our attention to how businesses are embedding Claude in their workflows through the API is that we see overwhelmingly [that] Claude is being embedded in automated ways.â€

Leading Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson found in a study last year that AI-related employment declines in the U.S. were largely concentrated in jobs where AI was used to completely or partially automate rather than augment.

AI companies aren’t helpless bystanders, though. The economist argues AI integration should follow augmentation instead of automation, and to do so, AI companies should develop benchmarks to test how well models can collaborate with humans to jointly solve tasks, rather than focusing on perfecting AI in the absence of humans.

McCrory is worried about AI automating “pure implementation†jobs like data entry workers who handle unstructured data or technical writers who synthesize and explain jargon in an accessible way. He says that Claude is already being used for the central tasks associated with those kinds of jobs, making them more at risk of displacement.

Another way that AI has been showing up in employment trends is through its impact on early-career workers. Just last week, the Irish government released a report saying that it was already starting to see AI impact job growth for workers aged 15 to 29 in high-risk sectors like financial services and information and communication technologies.

The Irish report aligns with Brynjolfsson’s findings from the August study focusing on the American job market. While American authorities haven’t released official data on AI’s impact on young workers, Fed Chair Jerome Powell did concede in September that AI is probably a factor in the dismal early-career employment trends in the U.S.

But except for finance and technology, AI adoption rates across sectors are still relatively low, and some experts remain skeptical about AI’s power to completely disrupt the labor market. Whether Anthropic’s Cowork assistants or any competitors can change that is, for now, a matter of speculation. Anthropic, for its part, seems determined.

“There’s no aspect of the economy that’s not set to change,†McCrory said.