An AI assistant that can send your email and edit your files sounds risky. The way Anthropic built the guardrails calms my nerves.
Claude sending email can be scary. Anthropic put a few guardrails in-place to help admins sleep easier at night.
Claude’s Cowork moved to the web and the phone this week, and it can now work inside Microsoft 365. It can draft and send email, manage your calendar, and create or edit files in SharePoint and OneDrive. The sessions run in the cloud too, so a task keeps going after you close the laptop.
If you are interested, here is what I would actually check before letting anything like this near your systems.
First, the approval gate. Cowork stops and asks for a yes before it sends, deletes, or shares anything outside the company, and you can approve it from your phone.
Second, the permission scope. It can only touch what that specific user could already touch, nothing more.
Third, the admin control. Write access has to be switched on by a Microsoft Entra global admin before it works at all, so no one person can flip it on alone.
The final part of this story is the ability of Claude Cowork
Technology is a tool, not the process. The tool is impressive. The process around who approves what is the part that keeps you out of trouble.