[FEATURE] Cowork/Claude: external read-only sharing for artifacts and projects (viewers without a subscription)

EDIT (2026-08-06): I overstated the problem in the original description below. Public artifact publishing already exists; the actual gap is that Cowork output is excluded from it. See the correction comment for the accurate, narrower request.

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

Problem
All collaboration primitives in Claude are scoped to a single organization on a paid plan:

• Project sharing (public/private, member view/edit, group access) — Team/Enterprise
• Live artifact sharing within an org — Team/Enterprise
• Cowork sessions — not shareable at all (documented)

There is no way to let someone outside your organization view anything you produce, at any plan tier. The only external path is exporting a file and sending it by some other channel, which drops all context, versioning, and updates.

Why this matters
The set of people who should see a document is almost never the same as the set of people on your subscription.
I'm a solo professional. My collaborators are clients and counterparties in my practice, and the board and volunteers of an all-volunteer 501(c)(3) chapter. Upgrading to Team would give me permissions over an organization containing only me, so the upgrade path doesn't solve my problem. That means the gap isn't a pricing tier issue, it's a modeling issue.
The volunteer case makes this concrete. "Have the organization buy seats" assumes there is an organization to buy them — an employer, IT, procurement, a shared email domain. An all-volunteer nonprofit has none of those. It has no staff at all. Its board is a network of individuals who each belong to some other company and contribute donated time. Because it's a 501(c)(3) chapter it would presumably qualify for nonprofit pricing, which changes nothing: there is no entity for seats to attach to, at any price, including free. This is not an edge case; it describes a large share of how the nonprofit sector actually operates.
This isn't only a small-user problem. Enterprises work constantly with outside counsel, contractors, auditors, agencies, board members, and customers. Any collaboration model that assumes collaborators are co-subscribers will keep hitting this.
Every mature collaboration tool converged on decoupling audience from billing — Google Docs link-sharing, Figma view links, Notion public pages — for this reason.

Proposed Solution

Proposal
A revocable, read-only external share link for outputs, not sessions:

• Scope: an individual artifact, a project doc, or a published bundle
• Viewer requires no Claude account or subscription
• Owner controls: revoke, expiry, optional passcode, optional "link shows latest vs. snapshot at time of sharing"
• Org admin policy control to disable or restrict external sharing (Team/Enterprise)

Explicitly out of scope
Sharing a live Cowork session. A running session holds connector credentials and a filesystem bridge to the user's machine, so sharing it means sharing that access — a legitimately hard security problem. This request deliberately avoids it. Artifacts and project docs are inert output and require none of that access to be viewable.

Alternative Solutions

Alternatives considered

• Upgrade to Team/Enterprise — doesn't help; sharing remains internal to an org that, for a solo practitioner, has one member.
• Export and email a file — loses updates, context, and any notion of a current version. This is the current state and it's the reason I'm filing.
• Share a regular chat link — chat links exist, but Cowork sessions can't be shared, and a chat link is a stale snapshot by default. Also shares the conversation rather than the deliverable.

Related

• #60082 — real-time multi-user collaboration on a session (different ask; that one is about co-presence, this one is about external read access to output)
• #48828 — group chat (closed as duplicate)

Priority

High - Significant impact on productivity

Feature Category

Other

Use Case Example

I sit on the board of the North Atlantic Audi Club, a chapter of a 501(c)(3). We have no staff. The organization is 100% volunteer, and the board is nine people who each hold senior roles at unrelated companies and contribute time on evenings and weekends.
I'm often the one who prepares the analysis the board makes decisions from — membership trends, event budgets versus actuals, post-event surveys, sponsorship proposals, risk and insurance documentation, etc. Claude is very good at this. In an hour I can turn ten years of membership data into trends and insight our board can actually act on.
Then I hit the wall: there's no way to show it to them.
What I do today is export to PDF, email the attachment, and field replies by email. Every revision is a new attachment. Nobody is sure which version is current. Anything interactive — a chart, a filterable table, a view of membership over time] — gets flattened to a static image or abandoned. The analysis survives; the artifact doesn't.
What I'd do with an external view link: paste one link in the board thread. Everyone opens the current version. Revisions update in place. I revoke it when the matter closes.
Why seats can't solve this: there is no organization to buy them for. No employer, no IT, no procurement, no shared email domain. As a 501(c)(3) chapter we'd presumably qualify for nonprofit pricing, and it would change nothing, because there's nobody to assign the seats to. The board isn't a company with a headcount. It's a network of individuals who each belong to some other company.
That last point is also where I'd flag an opportunity. The people who would receive that link are senior operators at their own firms — the population you sell to, assembled voluntarily, meeting on a schedule. Today they see a PDF with no indication of what produced it. A view link would put finished Claude work in front of a dozen enterprise decision-makers at zero inference cost, delivered by a volunteer doing it on his own time.

Additional Context

Context
Filing this as a daily Cowork user running a production workflow, not a drive-by request. The model capability is excellent — this is a gap in the surrounding product surface, and it's the single thing most limiting how far I can take Claude in professional and philanthropic work.