Claude and Cowork now share what they know about you

Anthropic's Claude chatbot knows a lot about its users, and now it's sharing its memories with the company's everything-but-coding assistant, Cowork. The frontier lab on Tuesday announced that Claude and Cowork now share a memory, meaning that what Claude remembers about users is also available to Cowork. That's a two-way street: Memories generated through users' interactions with Cowork will also be available to the regular Claude chatbot. Services like Claude are able to store information about users, like what they're interested in, the names of their friends, family members, and coworkers, or almost anything else that's mentioned in the course of a conversation. Those memories are used to contextualize later responses so that Claude isn't answering from a blank slate every time a user chats. As Anthropic explains in the announcement, memories are particularly helpful for work tasks of the type that Cowork is designed to perform. Cowork is a lot like Claude Code in that it's designed to automate manual work tasks, but in this case it's not about software development and is instead about everything else professionals deal with on a daily basis, like writing a report from a spreadsheet, creating a presentation from said report, or what have you. Y'know - work. Ask Cowork to draft an update for your manager, and it already knows who that is and how she likes updates written," Anthropic offers as one use of the new shared memory. As other examples, Anthropic posits brainstorming a conference agenda with Claude Chat and having Cowork know all about the event as it builds budget and logistics documents, or having to define once how a team likes metrics presented in a Claude chat and relying on Cowork to remember that format every quarter as you force it to do the work an intern used to have to be trusted to whip up. It's worth noting that Claude Code's memory is staying separate, Anthropic told us. The company also mentioned it had nothing to share about the future of Claude Code's memory and whether it'd join the hive in the future. As for how Claude and Cowork create their shared memories, that's changing, too, Anthropic explained in the announcement. Whereas the pair previously created memories by reviewing a conversation at its conclusion, memories are now created on the fly during chats. Memory generation is on by default for users on free, Pro, and Max tiers (Cowork isn't available on Free accounts, though), but Anthropic said it doesn't remember sensitive" things without users opting to allow those to be stored in memory. Sensitive topics include things related to health, ethnicity, religious beliefs, politics, gender identity, and the like, though adding those to memory can be enabled if users so choose. Cowork will know those things too, mind you, and Anthropic told us there's no option to separate Claude Chat and Cowork's memories since they now use a shared system. An Anthropic spokesperson explained that the only way to keep Claude Chat and Cowork memories separate is to use different accounts. Other options, we're told, are to entirely pause Claude's ability to remember stuff, use incognito chats for conversations users don't want remembered, or manually prune Claude's memory to get rid of individual topics. The new shared memory is available from Tuesday; for Team and Enterprise customers, admins control whether memory is available, so if any of those great business features mentioned above sound useful, you may have to call IT and have them enable it. (R)