Claude Cowork vs Amazon Quick: which agent for which job
Learn how Claude Cowork and Amazon Quick differ and which one is the right fit for your work.
Claude
Amazon Quick
We put Anthropic’s Claude Cowork and AWS’s Amazon Quick side by side on the four things that decide how much of your work you can actually hand over.
A new category of assistant has taken shape over the past year. It isn’t a chatbot and it isn’t a coding tool. It’s an agent that opens your files, reaches into the applications you already use, works through a task in steps, and hands back something finished - a cleaned spreadsheet, a drafted report, a sorted-out mailbox. You describe the outcome, and it does the intermediate work.
The point of these tools isn’t to answer faster. It’s to absorb the work of moving information between systems by hand: pulling figures out of one application, reshaping them, and putting the result into another. Doing that reliably asks more of the software than a chat window ever did. It needs an environment of its own to run tasks in, and real access to your data.
Two products now sit squarely in that category: Claude Cowork from Anthropic and Amazon Quick from AWS. Here is how they actually differ.
What Claude Cowork is
Claude Cowork is an AI agent released by Anthropic. It’s built on the same agentic architecture that powers Claude Code, but aimed at someone with folders, mailboxes and deadlines rather than a repository. You connect folders and apps, describe a task, and Claude works through it in steps.
Cowork runs in the cloud by default and reaches your computer through the Claude desktop app. It’s included in every paid plan. It’s also on web and mobile, where availability still varies by plan. One thing to budget for: Cowork consumes usage limits faster than chat does.
Claude Cowork's home screen. The toggle at the bottom of the prompt switches between Chat and Cowork mode; the selector beneath it attaches a project or folder to the session.
What Amazon Quick is
Amazon Quick is the AI assistant from AWS. It’s built on the systems a company already runs rather than the files on one person’s disk: you connect data sources and business applications, and it answers questions against them, runs longer investigations, and turns repeatable work into automations you can version and schedule.
You reach it from the web and from iOS and Android. There is also a desktop app, still in preview and limited to Plus and Enterprise accounts. Subscriptions run Free, Plus, Professional and Enterprise, and the tier matters more here than the plan does in Cowork.
Amazon Quick's home screen. On first launch it walks you through connecting local folders, email, and messaging so it can monitor what matters.
Comparison
Both products describe themselves in nearly the same words, so the useful comparison isn’t what they claim to do but how they do it. Four areas carry the difference: tool integrations, memory and state, extensions, and security and monitoring. Together they decide how much of your work you can actually hand over.
Tool integrations
External systems reach the agent through MCP, and what arrives isn’t data but the ability to act: read an email, file a ticket, update a record. The reach you give it is the ceiling on what you can delegate.
The Claude Cowork connectors directory, filtered to Anthropic & Partners. Each entry shows a review badge and usage rank; the directory spans both verified and community-reviewed connectors.
Before any of that is connected, Cowork already has a working set of tools. It searches the web and fetches pages. It reads, creates and modifies files inside the folders you attach to a session. And it runs shell commands in its own sandbox, which lets it script through work that has no interface at all: renaming a few hundred files, reshaping a CSV. That is why it works on material that lives nowhere but your disk.
On top of that sits the connectors directory, where each entry carries a label for how much review it has had rather than for who built it. Verified connectors are reviewed by Anthropic. Community connectors pass automated checks only. The label is about review, not behaviour: both work the same way once connected, and the directory itself ranks by usage, the way an app store does. If what you need isn’t listed, you point Cowork at your own MCP server as a custom connector.
Amazon Quick has a catalog too, maintained by AWS, covering the business systems most teams already run on. It isn’t closed either: three entries in it are extensibility hatches rather than applications. Register a remote MCP server and its tools appear as actions. Upload an OpenAPI schema and Amazon Quick generates an action per operation. Or point a REST API connection at a base URL and supply the credentials yourself.
Memory and state management
Memory is what carries from one conversation to the next. Without it, every session starts cold. You re-explain where the data lives, which format the output takes, which conventions the team follows. With it, the tenth run of a job is routine.
A Cowork project collects instructions, memory, context files, and scheduled tasks in one place. The daily briefing shown here runs automatically; the session picker at the top switches between Chat and Cowork within the same project.
The simplest layer is written by you. Standing instructions carry your role, your tone and the formats you want into every session, and a folder or project can add its own on top. On Team and Enterprise, organization instructions take precedence where they contradict an individual’s.
The more valuable layer is procedural. Once you’ve worked out how to do something, that method can be captured as a skill, either by recording yourself doing the task and letting Claude build it from what it observes or by writing a SKILL.md yourself. The next run is execution rather than rediscovery.
Underneath that, Cowork keeps its own memory: short notes about working preferences, project context and corrections you made, written during a session and read back at the start of later ones. You can view it, edit it and delete from it at any time.
Projects are where this comes together. A project holds its instructions, context files, memory and scheduled tasks, and since chat and Cowork share one home, you can start either kind of work inside it. The two layers behave differently there. What you write applies everywhere. What Claude learns is scoped to the project, and a session started outside one accumulates nothing.
On Team and Enterprise a project can be shared, either openly with your whole organization or privately with the people you invite, and with view or edit permission. What travels is the setup, not the work: the conversations inside stay private. But a project tied to a folder on your machine supports Cowork sessions on desktop only, and can’t be shared at all.
A project connected to a local folder cannot be shared with teammates and runs Cowork sessions on desktop only. If collaboration matters, keep the project cloud-based.
The same trade shows up in scheduled tasks. They cover work that runs when you are not there, on every paid plan, and where they run depends on what they touch. A task that needs only your connectors runs remotely. A task that needs local files runs on your computer, so it only fires while the machine is on.
Amazon Quick organizes the same ground differently. Its spaces gather files, knowledge bases and actions for a team, opened to named people or groups as owner or viewer. The knowledge bases matter most, because they feed a searchable index of your documents. Cowork has one too. The difference is who sets it up. Amazon Quick’s knowledge base is something you build, point at sources, and open to the people you name. Cowork’s index appears on its own once a project’s knowledge approaches the context window limit. The folders you attach stay outside both. Claude searches those by name and by phrase, which rewards files that were named and filed sensibly. Amazon Quick also builds a knowledge graph, though only in the desktop app, and that is the harder gap.
Extensions
Extensions let the agent work inside the applications and files already open on your computer, instead of you carrying the document over to it and the result back.
In the browser, Claude in Chrome reads pages, clicks and navigates while you watch, which covers everything that has a website but no connector. Several categories of action stay blocked whichever approval level you set: financial transactions, creating accounts, permanent deletions, and following instructions it finds on the page. Beyond the browser, Claude can drive the whole desktop, though that is still a research preview, on Pro and Max only.
Claude in Chrome will not execute financial transactions, create accounts, perform permanent deletions, or follow instructions embedded in a page — regardless of which approval level you choose. These are hard limits, not settings.
In documents, Claude installs into Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook, working with the file’s own structure rather than pasting text into it. In a spreadsheet that means cells, formulas, pivot tables and charts across multi-tab workbooks, with answers cited to the cell. In a deck, slides built from your own template. In a document, edits that land as tracked revisions. Excel, PowerPoint and Word are generally available. Outlook is still in beta.
Amazon Quick covers the same applications and adds Slack and Teams. In the browser, it splits the job in two.
The extension only reads. It summarizes the page, answers questions across multiple pages and files at once, triggers action connectors you have already configured, and runs saved flows with the page as context. It does not act on the page for you.
The desktop app is where Amazon Quick matches Claude in Chrome. It launches Chrome, or connects to the one you already have open with your live logins, then navigates, clicks, types and runs JavaScript in it. The capability is real, it just lives in one place: an app still in preview, on Plus and Enterprise accounts.
Security and monitoring
Two things decide whether an agent can be let near real systems: control over what it can touch while it runs, and a record afterwards of what it actually did.
Cowork runs every session in isolation. Cloud sessions get their own sandbox, created at the start and destroyed at the end, sharing nothing with other sessions or organizations, with outbound traffic forced through a proxy it cannot bypass. In local sessions the shell commands and any code Claude writes run in a hypervisor-isolated virtual machine. The agent loop itself runs natively on the device, held back by an application-layer permission system rather than by the hypervisor. Either way, the agent sees only the folders you attached.
Within that boundary you set how much it asks. A session runs in one of three approval modes: approve every action, approve automatically while each step is screened for safety, or skip approvals entirely. You also choose which connectors a conversation may use, and on Team and Enterprise an owner can set each connector permission to Always allow, Needs approval, or Blocked. You pick the model and its effort, and on Enterprise an administrator can set the default and limit which models appear.
For the record afterwards, Team and Enterprise organizations can stream Cowork activity to their own OpenTelemetry collector: prompts, responses, tool calls, permission decisions and API errors, from both cloud and local sessions. The Compliance API returns transcripts, but only for Enterprise organizations, and in beta, now covering local sessions as well as cloud ones.
Amazon Quick inherits the AWS control plane rather than building its own: identity through IAM Identity Center or SAML federation, and permission profiles that can deny by default. Chat, feedback and usage logs stream to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon S3 or Amazon Data Firehose, while the admin and API audit trail runs through AWS CloudTrail. If your governance already runs on those, that is a head start. The cost is regional: with cross-region inference your prompts and outputs may leave your primary region within the same geography, and the logs will not say where.
With cross-region inference enabled, Amazon Quick may process prompts and outputs outside your primary AWS region. The logs will not record which region was used. If data residency is a compliance requirement, verify your inference settings before going live.
Amazon Quick’s desktop app runs code on your machine too. Python runs in a sandbox the operating system provides rather than a virtual machine, and inside it file access follows the folder permissions you set - except for the system temporary directories, which stay reachable whatever you choose. Each of the built-in tools can be set to full access, read only or ask each time, down to individual operations, but they all ship on full access.
Amazon Quick’s desktop app tools ship with full access by default. Review and tighten the per-tool permissions before connecting it to sensitive directories.
Summary: which one, and when
Everything above can be reduced to a short decision tree.
In short: if you want an agent for your own day-to-day work - your files, your apps, your own context - Cowork is the fit. If you want one assistant for a whole team, with shareable spaces and knowledge bases configured out of the box, Amazon Quick is. One difference runs through all four sections either way: the entry level. Cowork asks less of someone without a technical background. Amazon Quick offers more, but its features are also more complex, and using them well takes a deeper understanding of how they work.
Resources
- Claude Cowork overview
- Claude Cowork architecture overview
- Claude Cowork on web, desktop and mobile
- Claude Cowork on Team and Enterprise plans
- Claude Cowork changelog
- Connectors directory
- Claude for Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook
- Monitor Cowork activity with OpenTelemetry
- What is Amazon Quick?
- Amazon Quick supported integrations
- Amazon Quick desktop
