Anthropic Turns the Claude Chrome Side Panel Into a Full Cowork Session

Summary

Anthropic upgraded the Claude in Chrome browser extension, so the side panel now runs a full Claude Cowork session rather than an isolated browser-only conversation. Conversations are saved to your account history, your skills and connectors carry over, and a task started in Chrome can be picked up later in the Claude desktop or mobile app. As a practical example, you can ask Claude in Chrome to pull invoice amounts from several vendor portals across multiple tabs, then continue the task in the desktop app to build a spreadsheet. Anthropic also added a secondary check that reviews Claude’s own actions before anything consequential, such as submitting a form or downloading a file. Available on Max and Team plans now; Pro users are rolling out over the coming weeks.

Why it matters

The previous version of Claude in Chrome kept browser sessions completely separate from your main Claude history, which made it significantly less useful for anything beyond quick one-off questions. The unified session fixes that. Anyone who uses Claude for work tasks and has the Chrome extension installed now has a more coherent way to bounce between browser work and longer desktop sessions.

HTD Says

Anthropic just fixed the most frustrating thing about Claude in Chrome: your browser conversations never carried over anywhere else, and now they do. A while back, I used the Chrome browser extension, but more recently, I have been doing all of my work within the Mac desktop app, which is more than capable.

However, there are times when Claude desktop needs to fetch a URL and may have to try multiple skills (or use curl) to access the page’s content. With OpenAI, there was the Atlas browser, which seems to have gone by the wayside and has been discontinued. Browser extensions seem like a logical step toward desktop integration.

My only issue is that Chrome (on the latest macOS developer beta) has been a bit troublesome (or it could be the 100s of tabs I leave open – ugh). I will, however, revisit the Claude Chrome browser extension because I think it will add value to AI sessions.

Source:

Anthropic