Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork Goes Out of Preview

Copilot Cowork, the agentic system that Microsoft developed in collaboration with Anthropic, is going out of preview today. The new Cowork experience, available from the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, can perform complex tasks on its own, and it’s now priced on a usage-based basis.

Microsoft first made Copilot Cowork available through its Frontier program, and the company said that it’s been the “fastest-growing feature” in the program’s history. “Cowork has among the highest user satisfaction of any Copilot or agent experience we have shipped,” said Charles Lamanna, EVP, Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, adding that more than half of Fortune 500 companies are now using Copilot Cowork.

Compared to Anthropic’s popular Claude Cowork AI agent, Lamanna also pointed out that the cost per prompt with Copilot Cowork was on average “30-40% cheaper.” According to the exec, that’s thanks to a multi-model design that picks up the most efficient model for the task at hand. Copilot Cowork currently uses Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 models, while customers on the Frontier program can access OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 as an alternative.

“Our newest model, Cowork 1, will be a secure, fine-tuned model releasing in the coming weeks, post-trained to handle tasks at a substantially lower cost. You are not locked into one model with Copilot—you can use the most efficient model or frontier models,” Lamanna explained.

Copilot Cowork is generally available to Microsoft 365 Copilot customers starting today, and it will soon add support for third-party plugins from Adobe, Atlassian, Box, Canva, and other companies. A new local Edge browser is also available for customers on Microsoft’s Frontier program.

Regarding cost management, organizations with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses will need to enable Copilot Cowork manually. Admins can choose who gets access to the agentic system and set up customizable usage alerts and spending limits.

“Tenants that had at least one user in the Frontier program (March 30 to June 16) who used Cowork during that period get a grace period on Cowork usage and will not be billed until July 1, 2026, to support the transition,” Lamanna said today. You can learn more details about Copilot Cowork billing on this support page.