Cowork, Personal Intelligence, Ads in ChatGPT and the Great Beyond
A Deep Dive into Claude Code with context. Its growth trajectory is widely cited as one of the fastest in the history of developer tools, and now it's about to grow in Enterprise domains globally. 🌍
The opening act of 2026 has felt fairly intense in the AI news cycle. Three days ago Google introduced Gemini’s Personal Intelligence. OpenAI is finally expanding into Ads in ChatGPT. Five days ago Anthropic pushed out Cowork. It led to a lot of chatter on Twitter/X.
Cowork was obviously inspired by success of Claude Code and its flagship Opus 4.5 model, that was one of the biggest improvements in AI in all of 2025. We’ve been uncovering the pace of change in Generative AI with three featured articles: In case you are a bit slow to get back into work this year, here’s what you missed:
2025 Recap: The Year the Old Rules Broke
Key Milestones of China in AI of 2025
AI Trends: 2025 Lookback and 2026 Outlook
I asked Ilia Karelin to help us break us down Anthropic’s recent product success and their transition from Claude Code to trying to make the desktop version a bit more accessible with Claude Cowork. His analysis of Claude Code is fairly deep with tons of details.
Gearing up for historic AI IPOs ✨
Two days ago Anthropic published their 4th edition of their Economic Index. Cowork was built using Anthropic’s own tools so you have to wonder if this is a side note in the ramp up to a kind of echo of recursive self-improving AI in product? It’s also branding right, Anthropic’s chief scientist has said this pseudo AI autonomy could spark a beneficial ‘intelligence explosion’. Jared Kaplan said that while efforts to align the rapidly advancing technology to human interests had to date been successful, freeing it to recursively self-improve “is in some ways the ultimate risk, because it’s kind of like letting AI kind of go”. Will Cowork be remembered as a first of sorts?
It’s about that time where you need to follow someone called “Boris” who works at Anthropic. Google’s own Personal Intelligence with Gemini is also an upgrade.
Did Gemini just make its “Her” Move? 👩🏻
Google has an absurd ecosystem advantage so what happend if you added “memory” to that? Gemini Personal Intelligence is a new capability layer from Google that allows Gemini to act as a unified reasoning engine across your entire Google ecosystem. People are racing to that “HER” (movie) style capability and many ChatGPT users are reporting switching to Gemini in recent months.
Google with Personal Intelligence can reason across: ✨
→ Your Gmail threads ✉︎
→ Your Photos library 📷
→ Your Search history 🔍
→ Your YouTube watch patterns 🎬
That really could lead to a more personalized AI over time. This is all planned ofcourse to coincide with Google’s AI-powered smart glasses that will integrate Gemini and Personal Intelligence. This is timed to compete with Apple’s AR glasses and OpenAI’s AI wearables. So in 2026 we’ll see not just BigAI IPOs but exciting wearables related to these chatbots urging us to take them with us wherever we go.
Boris Cherny has a steady stream of Claude Cowork tidbits, like improvements they are adding daily.
All in all it really does look like AI might be a bit more actionable and useful in 2026. We already covered how the agent protocols enable this to happen. Google, Anthropic and Qwen (Alibaba Cloud) appear to be at the forefront of making AI more useful.
Anthropic’s Claude Code was the AI product of the Year of 2025 for me. Ilia’s article really goes into some depth about why this is meaningful for the future of AI. A lot has been said on this platform as well around Anthropic’s leadership in AI and about Claude Cowork.
What’s all this about this guy named Claude? 🚨
Official Claude Prompting: Everything You Need To Know
The 5 Claude Skills Every Digital Product Creator Needs
Your Guide to Claude Cowork
Claude Coworks
Anthropic Shipped Cowork in 10 Days Using Its Own AI
Claude Code Coded Claude Cowork
Clearly Claude Code and the Cowork launch was in the air. 💥 (though I have my eyes more on DeepSeek to be honest).
Lydia is another X account to follow regarding Claude Code and Cowork. What all of these articles don’t say exactly is how impactful Opus 4.5 has been in tandem with the Claude Code launch. This is leading Anthropic to develop their product more rapidly than their competition as well as having the best in class AI coding models. This competitive advantage in business adoption might turn out to be profound.
One of the best articles to understanding how Claude Code was built is this one.
Claude Code: Deep Dive
The Accidental $1 Billion Product (And Why It’ll Keep Growing)
Ilia writes Prosper, a newsletter about practical AI workflows and systems thinking. He cover how professionals can use AI tools effectively.
The Side Project That Became a Billion-Dollar Business
In September 2024, Boris Cherny joined Anthropic with a simple mandate: prototype new products.
Cherny had an unconventional background for a tech leader. He studied economics, dropped out to start companies at 18, worked at a hedge fund, and spent a decade climbing from IC4 to Principal Engineer at Meta - all without a computer science degree. What was surprising, is that Boris didn’t have a computer degree. At Anthropic, his first creation was almost comically mundane: a command-line tool that used Claude to identify what music was playing during work sessions.
Then a colleague, Cat Wu, suggested adding filesystem access.
“Suddenly, this agent was really interesting,” Cherny recalled. Claude could now autonomously explore codebases, read files, and follow import chains. What started as a musical curiosity had become something far more powerful.
Within five days of internal release in November 2024, 50% of Anthropic’s engineering team was using it daily. By July 2025, the tool processed 195 million lines of code weekly across 115,000 developers. In November 2025 - just six months after public launch - Claude Code hit $1 billion in annualized revenue.
The accidental product had become Anthropic’s fastest-growing business.
Editor’s Note: Anthropic’s ARR is highly likely to surge in 2026 in dramatic fashion. As both Anthropic and OpenAI are set to go IPO in the months ahead this is all getting rather serious for the future winners of AI. Claude Code is central to to that and what comes next:
What Makes Claude Code Different
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