[FEATURE] Support Remote MCPs in Cowork as in Claude Code

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

Hi,

I've been looking through the issue-tracker and couldn't find any matching ticket.

We're in a situation where not every MCP is a STDIO one, but we have a few internal to our network that use http. Unfortunately, in Cowork it's not possible to easily use those as they require to be open to the public internet and are talked to by the Anthropic Cloud according to https://support.claude.com/en/articles/11176164-use-connectors-to-extend-claude-s-capabilities#h_4201f9e625

Custom connectors connect to your MCP server from Anthropic's cloud, not from your local device. Your server must be reachable over the public internet. If it's behind a firewall or on a private network

That's not what we want. These remote servers should stay internal to our network and thus be more secure.

Adding this to the Claude config under claude_desktop_config.json leads to an error on startup that it can't load the MCP and skips it.

      "mcpServers": {
        "custom-mcp": {
          "type": "http",
          "url": "https://ourcustom.mcp.com"
        }
      }

I don't really understand the rationale behind that decision as it severely limits the usefulness and extendability of Cowork for people, if you ask me. Other connectors based on e.g. a command are also running locally. So I'm not sure why HTTP based ones need to be routed through this special path. Especially since this is already possible through Claude Code and works just fine.

Proposed Solution

I'd like to be able to add a custom HTTP-based remote MCP without the need to open it to the public internet and have feature parity between Claude Code and Claude Cowork in that regards.

Cheers,
Christoph

Alternative Solutions

_No response_

Priority

Critical - Blocking my work

Feature Category

CLI commands and flags

Use Case Example

_No response_

Additional Context

_No response_