If you’re on Windows and trying to download Claude Cowork, I’ve got bad news.

It doesn’t exist yet. Not for you, anyway.

Anthropic’s new AI desktop agent — the one that’s been all over the news, the one that spooked the entire SaaS market — is macOS only. Windows support is “in active development” with a targeted release sometime mid-2026.

So if you’re a Windows user who saw the demos and got excited, you’re stuck waiting. Unless you’re not.

What Claude Cowork Actually Is

In case you missed it: Claude Cowork is Anthropic’s new agentic assistant that runs on your desktop. Unlike regular Claude chat, Cowork can actually do things.

You describe what you want done, walk away, and come back to finished work.

The tutorials show it doing stuff like:

  • Sorting and renaming messy download folders
  • Turning screenshots into expense spreadsheets
  • Creating report drafts from scattered notes
  • Organizing files based on content
  • Synthesizing research from multiple documents

It’s basically an AI coworker that handles the tedious stuff while you focus on actual thinking.

Pretty cool, right? I thought so too. Then I checked the system requirements.

The macOS Problem

Here’s the deal: Claude Cowork requires the Claude Desktop app. The Claude Desktop app is macOS only.

Anthropic says Windows is coming. Mid-2026 is the target. But we’re in early February, so that’s potentially 4-6 months away.

If you’re on Windows, you have options:

  1. Wait
  2. Buy a Mac (lol)
  3. Find something else that works now

I went with option 3.

What I Found Instead

My actual workflow doesn’t happen on my desktop anyway. It happens in my browser.

Think about it: email is in Chrome. LinkedIn is in Chrome. Google Docs, Salesforce, Notion, our company wiki — all Chrome. The only reason I’d want a desktop AI is if it could help with that stuff.

Turns out there’s a category of tool that does exactly this: browser agents.

A browser agent is basically Claude Cowork for your browser instead of your desktop. It sees what you see, understands context, and can take action.

The difference:

  • Claude Cowork = desktop agent, works with local files, macOS only
  • Browser agent = browser extension, works with web apps, runs anywhere Chrome runs

Since most of my work happens in web apps, a browser agent actually covers more of my daily workflow than Claude Cowork would.

What This Looks Like in Practice

I’ve been using dassi for the past few weeks. Here’s how dassi automates browser tasks:

Email drafting: I’m looking at a thread in Gmail. I tell it “draft a reply, be direct but friendly.” It reads the whole conversation — who said what, the tone, the context — and writes something that fits. No copying, no pasting, no explaining the situation.

Research synthesis: I had seven tabs open about a competitor. Asked it to summarize the key differences from our product. It read all seven pages and gave me bullet points in maybe 30 seconds.

CRM updates: After a sales call, I tell it to log the notes in Salesforce. It navigates there, finds the right record, and adds the summary. I don’t touch the CRM.

Form filling: Had to fill out a long vendor application last week. Instead of typing the same company info for the hundredth time, I just let the AI handle it.

Is this exactly what Claude Cowork does? No. Cowork can handle local files in ways a browser agent can’t. But for knowledge work that happens in the browser — which is most of it — it’s pretty close.

The Windows Reality

Here’s my honest take:

If your work is heavily file-based — lots of local documents, spreadsheets, PDFs — Claude Cowork will probably be worth waiting for. The desktop integration and file access make sense for that workflow.

But if you’re like me and your work lives in web apps, you don’t need to wait. Browser agents work on Windows right now. They work on Mac too. They work anywhere you have Chrome.

I’ll probably try Claude Cowork when it comes to Windows. Maybe it’ll be great. Maybe it’ll replace what I’m using now.

But I’m not putting my productivity on hold for 4-6 months waiting for Anthropic to ship a Windows build. That seems dumb.

Getting Started

If you want to try a browser agent while waiting for Claude Cowork, getting started takes less than 5 minutes:

  1. Install dassi from the Chrome Web Store (takes 30 seconds)
  2. Connect your Anthropic API key (so you’re using Claude specifically) or use the built-in credits
  3. Open the side panel on any webpage
  4. Start asking it to help with whatever you’re working on

No waiting for mid-2026. No switching to macOS. Just AI that works where your work actually happens.

Will Claude Cowork for Windows be worth it when it arrives? Probably. Is it worth waiting months to get AI help with your daily work? Probably not. Try Dassi and see if a browser agent covers what you need.