Anthropic Executive: Cowork Agent's Potential Surpasses Claude Code

Anthropic is placing its bet on an AI agent aimed at a broader group of working professionals, and believes its market potential will exceed the star product Claude Code, which has already generated more than $2 billion in annualized revenue for the company.

On April 2, according to Bloomberg, Anthropic’s chief business officer Paul Smith said on Wednesday (April 1) that Cowork’s user adoption pace in the “first few weeks” after its launch has outperformed Claude Code’s showing in the same period a year earlier.

He pointed out that engineers in large enterprises typically make up only 2% to 5% of the total workforce, while Cowork’s target audience is “all of the rest of us”—meaning its potential market size is far larger than that of Claude Code, which is aimed at developers.

Analysis indicates that Cowork’s strong start carries important strategic significance for Anthropic, which is looking to replicate Claude Code’s success path while also dealing with IPO expectations, legal disputes, and intense competition.

Cowork: A general-purpose AI agent for the masses

Cowork was released earlier this year in the form of a “research preview,” quickly sparking widespread attention online.

Unlike Claude Code, Cowork does not require users to run a terminal or enter command-line instructions, making the barrier to use significantly lower, and it is designed to handle a broader range of work tasks rather than being limited to programming scenarios. The report said Paul Smith’s logic is clear:

If engineers are just a small minority in most enterprises, then a general-purpose agent intended for all employees would, in theory, be able to reach a much larger user base than Claude Code. Anthropic hopes to use Cowork to replicate the success it has built up among software developers in a broader set of workplace scenarios.

Claude Code is one of the core drivers behind Anthropic breaking into the AI top tier, and the company recently disclosed that its annualized revenue has surpassed $2 billion. With this achievement, Anthropic has secured an important position in competition with OpenAI.

Paul Smith said he expects the pace of future product releases to further accelerate. “The speed of innovation will increase,” he said. “You can be fairly confident in forecasting that model releases will continue to move forward, and the frequency will only keep getting higher.”

However, rapid iteration also comes with a cost. Paul Smith admitted that the earlier incident in which Claude Code’s source code was accidentally leaked was due to a “process mistake” in the company’s fast product release cycle, but emphasized that the leak was absolutely not a security vulnerability or a hacker attack, and that the issues have been addressed.

Legal disputes alongside IPO expectations

The report said that behind its rapid expansion, Anthropic is facing external pressure at the same time.

The company is currently embroiled in a legal dispute with the U.S. government—stemming from the Pentagon classifying it as a supply chain risk, with the trigger being the standoff between the two sides over AI safety guardrails. Anthropic has warned that this determination could cause it to lose tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

In response, Paul Smith said that some clients instead recognize the principled stance Anthropic has demonstrated in its dealings with the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, according to earlier media reports, Anthropic is pushing forward with plans to go public as early as this year. Paul Smith declined to comment on the IPO timeline, but said the company is “very confident about the direction of progress on our gross margin goals and the profitability goals we previously outlined.”

On the funding side, in February this year, Anthropic completed a $30 billion funding round, providing ample ammunition for its continued investments in chips, data centers, and talent, as it prepares for full-scale competition with giants such as OpenAI and Google.

“After completing the recent financing, we’re very satisfied with our capital situation,” Paul Smith said.

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