Anthropic's Knowledge-Work Plugins: Every Role Plugin, Explained

Anthropic's knowledge-work-plugins repository is a set of open-source, Apache-2.0 licensed plugins that turn Claude into a specialist for a job: sales, finance, legal, marketing, HR, design, engineering, and more. Each one is a folder of Markdown skills plus a JSON file of connector definitions, built for Claude Cowork and also loadable in Claude Code. This guide catalogs every Anthropic-built plugin in the repo as of September 2026, gives the exact install commands, and shows how to fork one for your team.

It is deliberately not the developer guide. For the plugin format itself (manifests, hooks, LSP servers, marketplaces) read Claude Code Plugins: Install, Use, and Build Your Own. This page is about the role plugins Anthropic ships; the glossary entry on Claude plugins covers the term.

Where they came from

• January 30, 2026: Anthropic added plugins to Cowork as a research preview for all paid users and open-sourced eleven plugins its own teams use: productivity, enterprise search, plugin management, sales, finance, data, legal, marketing, customer support, product management, and biology research.
• February 24, 2026: HR, design, engineering, and operations joined the repo, along with partner-built plugins (Slack by Salesforce, Apollo, Common Room, and a brand-voice plugin by Tribe AI) and admin controls for Team and Enterprise. Financial-analysis, investment-banking, equity-research, private-equity, and wealth-management plugins shipped the same day but live in a separate anthropics/financial-services repository.
• September 2026: the repo's marketplace.json lists 99 entries. Seventeen are Anthropic-built and live in the repo, five partner plugins sit in partner-built/, and the rest are third-party plugins pulled from their own GitHub repositories (Zapier, Figma, Canva, Datadog, Box, Dropbox, Airtable, monday.com, and others).

Every Anthropic-built plugin

Counts come from the repository tree at commit 34e1eae (September 8, 2026). "Skills" are the SKILL.md folders each plugin ships; connectors are the MCP servers pre-configured in its .mcp.json.

Two things stand out. First, the plugins are heavy on skills and light on everything else: only product-management and pdf-viewer ship a commands/ folder, and no Anthropic-built plugin ships an agents/ folder even though the README mentions sub-agents (the partner-built brand-voice plugin does). Skills double as slash commands (/sales:call-prep, /data:write-query), so nothing is lost. Second, the connector lists are long because plugins are tool-agnostic: each CONNECTORS.md explains that skills reference categories like ~~CRM or ~~chat, and whatever you connect in that category fills the slot.

What skills, connectors, and commands mean here

If you have read What Are Claude Skills?, the pieces are familiar; if not, here is the short version.

• A skill is a SKILL.md file whose description tells Claude when to use it. Claude loads it when a task matches, or you invoke it by name. The sales plugin's call-prep triggers on "prep me for my call with [company]" and "works standalone with user input and web research, supercharged when you connect your CRM." See agent skills.
• A connector is an entry in the plugin's .mcp.json: an MCP server for HubSpot, Snowflake, Gmail, and so on, over the Model Context Protocol. Installing the plugin pre-configures them; you still authorize each one. AI connectors covers the concept.
• A command is a Markdown file in commands/ that you run explicitly. Newer plugins put everything in skills/ instead, which the Claude Code docs now recommend.

Everything is Markdown and JSON; there is no code to compile, which is why non-developers can fork these.

Installing in Cowork

The Knowledge Work marketplace is registered in Cowork by default. Open the Customize menu in the left sidebar, choose Plugins, click Browse plugins, and press Install on the one you want. Plugins are available on all paid plans (Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise); which plan you need for Cowork itself is covered in Claude plans compared. You can also install in chat on the web and in the Chat tab of Claude Desktop, but hooks and sub-agents run only in Cowork and appear grayed out elsewhere. A plugin's bundled connectors are set up for you "without you connecting each one."

On Team and Enterprise, owners can mark each plugin Installed by default, Available, Required, or Not available, run an organization-specific marketplace, and (in private beta) use private GitHub repositories as plugin sources. Members cannot remove required plugins.

Installing in Claude Code

From a terminal, two commands:

# register the marketplace once
claude plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins
 
# install a plugin from it
claude plugin install sales@knowledge-work-plugins

Inside a session the equivalents are /plugin marketplace add anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins and /plugin install sales@knowledge-work-plugins. Once installed, skills fire automatically and are also available as namespaced slash commands, /sales:call-prep and the like. If you have never used the terminal tool, Installing Claude Code is the ten-minute setup.

In Claude Code the .mcp.json servers are ordinary MCP configs: you authorize each one the first time it starts, and warehouse connectors such as Snowflake need credentials your admin controls.

Forking and customizing

The README is candid that "these plugins are generic starting points." The intended path:

1. Copy the plugin folder. It is four things: .claude-plugin/plugin.json, .mcp.json, skills/, and a CONNECTORS.md.
2. Swap connectors. Edit .mcp.json to point at your stack. If your CRM is Salesforce rather than HubSpot, that is one entry.
3. Add company context. Put your terminology, org chart, pricing tiers, and house style into the relevant SKILL.md files. This is where most of the value comes from.
4. Adjust workflows. Rewrite a skill's steps to match how your team actually does the thing, "not how a textbook says to."
5. Test it. In Claude Code, claude --plugin-dir ./my-sales loads the folder for one session; in Cowork, upload it as a custom plugin from the same Plugins tab, or add your repository with Add from a repository.
6. Ship it. Contributions go back to Anthropic as a pull request; internal versions go into your own marketplace repository.

The cowork-plugin-management plugin automates steps 1 to 4 from inside Cowork: its two skills interview you about your tools and generate or modify a plugin folder.

Licensing

The repository is licensed under the Apache License 2.0, so you can modify and redistribute the plugins, including inside a company, with the license notice intact. Partner-built plugins carry their own LICENSE files, and third-party marketplace entries live in their own repositories; check each before redistributing.

Which plugin to start with

Pick the plugin that matches your title, install it, and run one skill on real work before customizing anything. The Start here page maps roles to workflows, and What Is Claude Cowork? walks through a first task. Skills you write for a plugin also upload directly to claude.ai; see Claude skills on claude.ai and the API.