Anthropic has integrated its Claude AI into a Chrome sidebar, transforming the assistant from a standalone app into an everyday browsing companion with increased accessibility and functionality, raising new privacy and security considerations.
Anthropic has folded Claude Cowork into its Claude for Chrome browser extension, extending the company’s AI assistant from a separate app into a persistent sidebar inside Google’s browser. Conversations begun in the Chrome panel are now saved to the user’s history, while skills and connectors can operate automatically within the browser. The change also lets users start a task in the Claude app and carry on in Chrome, or do the reverse, making the workflow less dependent on a single device or interface.
According to Anthropic’s support material, Claude in Chrome can read, click and navigate websites directly, which gives the assistant a more active role than a conventional chatbot. The company says the extension is available across paid plans, including Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise, with administrative controls for organisations. That broad access suggests Anthropic is positioning the tool as both a consumer convenience and a workplace assistant.
The browser integration builds on Anthropic’s earlier move to put Claude Code into the Chrome plugin for more technical users. Claude Cowork was created as the simpler, general-purpose option, aimed at people who want the assistant to handle everyday tasks rather than programming work. Anthropic has also recently added smartphone control, and Claude for Chrome was rolled out to all Anthropic users in late 2025, according to the company.
The feature is likely to be most useful for people who spend much of the day inside Chrome and want Claude to work across services that lack direct integrations. That said, reviews of the extension have highlighted the amount of access it may require to webpages, calendars and documents, while security researchers have also warned of possible browser-hijacking risks if vulnerabilities are not addressed quickly. Anthropic’s expansion therefore offers greater convenience, but it also raises the same privacy and security questions now surrounding many browser-based AI agents.
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