The initial shipped version of Claude Co-work, a few months prior to the interview, had a wizard-like experience and showed a lot of UI upfront to differentiate it from chat, but this was later stripped back due to competing visual elements.

Another early prototype of Claude Co-work attempted to guide users towards specific outcomes like analysis or documents, offering dials to adjust document length or type, but this also felt overwhelming.

The idea for Claude Co-work, as a thinking partner for general knowledge workers, has been considered by Anthropic for approximately a year prior to its launch.