Customize Cowork with plugins

Cowork, Claude's collaborative workspace environment, has become an essential tool for teams looking to harness AI-powered productivity. Today, we're thrilled to announce plugin support for Cowork, enabling organizations to extend and customize their AI workflows in unprecedented ways.

The Power of Extensibility

Every organization has unique tools, workflows, and requirements. While Cowork provides powerful out-of-the-box functionality, we recognized that teams need the flexibility to integrate their existing systems and create custom behaviors tailored to their specific use cases. Plugins make this possible.

What Are Cowork Plugins?

Cowork plugins are modular extensions that add new capabilities to your workspace. They can:

- Connect to external services: Integrate with your CRM, project management tools, databases, and APIs
- Add custom commands: Create shortcuts for common workflows specific to your team
- Enhance data processing: Add specialized analysis, formatting, or transformation capabilities
- Customize the interface: Tailor the Cowork experience to match your team's preferences
- Implement security policies: Add organization-specific validation, approval workflows, or data handling rules

Plugins run in a secure sandbox environment with explicit permission controls, ensuring that your data and Claude's core functionality remain protected.

Featured Plugin Categories

Developer Tools

GitHub Integration: Create issues, review pull requests, and manage repositories directly from Cowork. Claude can analyze code changes, suggest improvements, and draft comprehensive PR descriptions.

CI/CD Connectors: Monitor build pipelines, trigger deployments, and receive notifications about test failures. Claude can help diagnose issues and suggest fixes based on error logs.

API Testing Suite: Generate and execute API tests, validate responses, and create comprehensive test documentation.

Business Applications

Salesforce Connector: Query customer data, update records, and generate reports. Ask Claude to "show me all opportunities closing this quarter" and get instant, formatted results.

Slack Bridge: Send messages, create channels, and manage notifications. Use natural language to coordinate team communications: "Notify the design channel about the updated mockups."

Google Workspace: Access and modify documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Claude can draft content, analyze data, and format information across your entire workspace.

Data and Analytics

SQL Query Builder: Connect to your databases and use natural language to generate, optimize, and execute queries. Claude can explain query plans and suggest performance improvements.

Visualization Suite: Create charts, graphs, and dashboards from your data. Simply describe what you want to see, and the plugin handles the technical details.

Data Transformation Pipeline: Clean, normalize, and enrich datasets. Define complex transformation rules using natural language descriptions.

Specialized Workflows

Legal Document Assistant: Analyze contracts, extract key terms, and identify potential issues. Includes plugins for GDPR compliance checking, NDA generation, and clause libraries.

Medical Research Tools: Access medical databases, parse clinical trial data, and stay current with recent publications. Designed for healthcare professionals with appropriate safeguards.

Financial Modeling: Build and analyze financial models, perform sensitivity analysis, and generate investment memos. Integrates with market data providers.

Building Your Own Plugin

For developers, we've made plugin creation straightforward. Here's a simple example:

javascript

import { CoworkPlugin } from '@anthropic/cowork-sdk';
class WeatherPlugin extends CoworkPlugin {

  name = 'weather';

  description = 'Get current weather for any location';
  async execute({ location }) {

    const data = await this.fetch(https://api.weather.com/v1/current?location=${location});

    return {

      temperature: data.temp,

      conditions: data.conditions,

      forecast: data.forecast

    };

  }

}
export default WeatherPlugin;

Once developed, plugins can be:

- Private: Used only within your organization
- Shared: Distributed to specific partners or customers
- Public: Published to the Cowork Plugin Directory for the entire community

Security and Governance

We take plugin security seriously. Every plugin:

- Runs in an isolated sandbox with limited permissions
- Must declare required capabilities upfront (network access, data storage, external APIs)
- Undergoes automatic security scanning for common vulnerabilities
- Can be audited by your security team before deployment
- Supports version control and rollback capabilities

Organization administrators have granular control over:

- Which plugins are available to which teams
- What data plugins can access
- Usage limits and rate throttling
- Audit logging for compliance requirements

Real-World Impact

Early adopters are already seeing significant benefits:

Technology Startup (50 employees): Built a custom plugin connecting their support ticketing system to Cowork. Claude now automatically categorizes tickets, suggests responses, and escalates complex issues. Support response time improved by 45%.

Law Firm (200 attorneys): Created a document management plugin that integrates their contract database with Cowork. Lawyers can ask Claude to "find all NDAs with Company X from the last 3 years" and receive instant results with relevant excerpts highlighted. Legal research time reduced by 60%.

Financial Services (500 employees): Developed a compliance plugin that validates all Claude-generated content against their regulatory requirements before it can be shared externally. This enabled broader Claude adoption while maintaining strict compliance standards.

Healthcare Provider: Implemented a HIPAA-compliant plugin that allows Claude to access patient data only after multi-factor authentication and provides detailed audit trails of every interaction. Clinicians can now use Claude for administrative tasks while maintaining full regulatory compliance.

Getting Started

Cowork plugins are available now for all Enterprise customers. To begin:

1. Explore the Plugin Directory: Browse 100+ pre-built plugins from Anthropic and the community
2. Install and Configure: Add plugins to your workspace with a single click
3. Start Using: Reference plugins in your Claude conversations using simple commands
4. Build Custom Plugins: Follow our comprehensive documentation to create your own

- Complete SDK and API documentation
- Plugin templates and starter kits
- Testing and debugging tools
- Community support forum
- Monthly office hours with our plugin engineering team

Plugin Development Resources

We've created extensive resources to support plugin developers:

Documentation: Comprehensive guides covering everything from basic setup to advanced features like streaming responses and state management.

Example Gallery: 50+ open-source plugins demonstrating common patterns and best practices.

Testing Framework: Built-in tools for unit testing, integration testing, and performance profiling.

Developer Community: Active Discord server where plugin developers share tips, troubleshoot issues, and showcase their creations.

The Future of Plugins

This is just the beginning. Our roadmap includes:

- Visual Plugin Builder: Create plugins using a no-code interface
- Plugin Chains: Connect multiple plugins in automated workflows
- Marketplace: Monetization options for commercial plugins
- AI-Assisted Development: Use Claude to help write plugin code
- Mobile Plugin Support: Run plugins in the Cowork mobile app

Plugins transform Cowork from a powerful AI assistant into a fully customizable AI platform that adapts to your organization's unique needs. Whether you're integrating existing tools, automating complex workflows, or building entirely new capabilities, plugins make it possible.

Ready to extend your Cowork experience? Visit the Plugin Directory in your workspace or explore our developer documentation to start building.