Yes. Claude Cowork can execute tasks that involve the internet and external services, but it does so through a controlled combination of (1) browser access (when paired with “Claude in Chrome”), and (2) connectors and skills that link Claude to external information and tools. In the Cowork research preview, the idea is not “Claude can call any API by default,” but “Claude can complete tasks end-to-end when you give it the right surfaces.” For example, Cowork can take a task like “collect these metrics from these pages and put them into a spreadsheet,” browse or reference the relevant sources, and then write a real .xlsx file into the folder you shared. If you want it to interact with an API directly (beyond simple web browsing), the reliable way is to expose that API via a connector/tool surface that Claude can use, or to have Cowork generate an executable artifact (curl commands, request payloads, scripts) that you run in your own environment where secrets and auditing are handled properly.
In practice, you’ll get the best outcomes by treating “internet/APIs” as a permissions and safety problem, not just a capability question. Cowork is explicitly designed to keep you in control: you decide which folders and connectors it can see, and it should ask before significant actions. When the internet is involved, you should also assume there is a non-zero risk of untrusted instructions embedded in web content (prompt-injection-style text). So the practical prompt pattern is: whitelist sources (“use only these URLs/domains”), define what to extract (“capture title, publish date, and the 5 key bullets”), and define outputs (“write out/results.csv with columns …”). For API work, be explicit about secrets (“never write API keys to files; use placeholders like ${API_KEY}”), and constrain side effects (“read-only endpoints only; no mutations; no deletes”). This is the same discipline you’d apply to any automation that can touch external systems: tight scope, explicit invariants, and logs.
A clean way to integrate Cowork into real systems is to have it produce structured outputs that your pipeline consumes, rather than letting it directly mutate production services. For example, Cowork can gather external info, normalize it into JSONL, and write out/records.jsonl plus a out/manifest.json that describes provenance (source URL, retrieval time, extraction rules). Your ingestion job can validate and then embed/index that content in a vector database such as Milvus or Zilliz Cloud (managed Milvus). This keeps the “agentic” part in a reviewable, file-based handoff while your production workflow retains deterministic controls (auth, retries, rate limiting, monitoring). It’s a safer architecture and usually easier to operate than giving an agent direct write access to external services.