Today · post October 11

Moorhead says merged Claude slowed his work; it's one report

Analyst Patrick Moorhead says that after Claude's chat and Cowork were merged, one of his two custom research workflows went from 20 minutes to 2 hours 57 minutes and the other from 6 minutes to 3 hours, with no better output. Moorhead is principal analyst at the industry-analysis firm Moor Insights & Strategy. Cowork is Anthropic's product in which Claude does the work itself; the research workflows he means are sets of steps a user configures in advance and can rerun (Patrick Moorhead, 2026-10-11). He traced four causes: opening many branches to work in parallel; ignoring the cap on tool calls; single tool calls running more than an hour; and, once web-search allowance ran out, opening a browser and operating the computer itself. His usage allowance also burned through quickly. By his diagnosis, the model now spins off many side threads and waits a long time on each, so total time balloons. This is one user's report, "caused by the merger" is his own diagnosis, and Anthropic hasn't responded publicly. ⚠️ Disclosure: we use Anthropic's models to help with analysis, and Claude is an Anthropic product. How we checked →

Concept illustration of two side-by-side panels, each showing a laptop whose black base is lettered CLAUDE in large white letters, with a beige plaque below it bearing a black angular mark above the word ANTHROPIC. On the left screen a speech bubble with gray lines sits above three red-orange boxes linked in a row by arrows to a document icon; on the right screen a speech bubble sits above one red-orange box whose three curved arrows lead to three stacked red-orange boxes each marked with an hourglass, and from them three arrows converge on a document icon.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 12, 2026, alongside 13 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Moorhead says merged Claude slowed his work; it's one report." https://secondsource.io/en/product/2026-10-12-2/. Accessed access date.