Claude Cowork

Claude Cowork is Anthropic’s weapon in the agentic coding war, directly competing with GitHub Copilot. Built on Claude AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP), it already powers enterprise search at Glean and automation via EkyBot. But the MCP dependency carries a hidden cost: Glean’s benchmark shows off-the-shelf MCP consumes 30% more tokens than indexed context—a scalability risk as Anthropic pushes Cowork into live dashboards (shipped April 21) and managed agents. The tension is sharp: Anthropic’s $30B revenue run rate fuels development, but its May 14 ejection of programmatic Claude use from Pro subscriptions signals a pivot to monetize Cowork directly. Cowork’s edge is Anthropic’s vertical integration—Claude Code feeds its capabilities. Yet Copilot’s GitHub ecosystem remains the incumbent. Can Cowork’s MCP tax justify premium pricing against Copilot’s entrenched workflow?

• ·Competes with GitHub Copilot in agentic coding
• ·Uses Claude AI and MCP; MCP token overhead is 30%
• ·Powers Glean and EkyBot integrations
• ·Anthropic’s $30B revenue funds development
• ·Recent launch: live dashboards connected to apps and files