ai and ml
Shared memory is live, with no option to separate it between services, Anthropic tells us; Claude Code stays apart for now
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.
