Anthropic's Claude and Cowork will share memories about you now - unless you opt out

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Today, Anthropic announced the merger of the memory systems for Claude chat and Claude Cowork.

"Starting today, the memory you use in chat is the same as in Claude Cowork. Now, wherever you work with Claude, it starts from what it already knows about you," said Anthropic.

Memory is now two-way. What you do in Claude chat is remembered by Claude Cowork. What you do in Cowork is remembered in chat. It seems that what happens in Claude Code still stays in Claude Code. The company made no mention of Claude Code whatsoever in the announcement. When I asked, I was told this update is "focused on Claude Cowork and chat."

Progress in implementing AI systems and services has been moving forward at warp speed, which some have taken to calling "AI speed." One of the side effects of this rapid pace of innovation is that experiments have turned into projects and then into products, often without the benefit of an end-to-end product plan.

As a result, we've been seeing capabilities mirrored across products but not necessarily coordinated between them. Features appear in one implementation but mysteriously vanish in the next (ChatGPT desktop, I'm looking at you ).

We're also starting to see the consolidation of features. This can be best seen in the trend, on the part of both OpenAI and Anthropic, to turn their individual desktop app offerings into "super apps," apps that contain the features of more than one previously individual desktop app.

Also: I used Claude Code to vibe code a Mac app in 8 hours, but it was more work than magic

Now, we're seeing another consolidation. Up until now, the memory of chat sessions you had with Claude as a chatbot was locked into the chatbot. The memory of sessions you've had with Claude Cowork was locked into Cowork.

Anthropic described this feature this way: "Cowork now has memory, and it's the same one you use in chat." It also said: "The context you've built up across months of conversations…is there the moment you hand Cowork a task, and what comes up in Cowork carries back to chat."

This implies that Claude's existing memory of your conversations will be available to Cowork, not just conversations that you start going forward. The company gives an example that supports this idea of preexisting knowledge:

"Ask Cowork to draft an update for your manager, and it already knows who that is and how she likes updates written. Brainstorm the agenda in chat for a conference you're organizing; when Cowork builds the budget and logistics doc, it knows the headcount, the city, and the speakers. Explain once in chat how your team defines its metrics, and every quarterly business review deck Cowork builds after that uses them, with no rebriefing."