I’m So Deep in Claude Co-Work I Can’t See the Surface

I’m so entrenched in Claude Co-Work that switching AI models feels less like changing tools and more like divorcing a business partner who knows where everything is filed.

I’ve tested a lot of AI models. Gemini Enterprise. ChatGPT. Codex. I landed on Claude Co-Work with the Fable model. And now I’m in deep.

Co-Work is a desktop app. It sits on my computer like a really smart colleague who never sleeps and never asks for a coffee break. I’ve hooked it into my creative workflow. Image files for optimisation. Social media content design. Desktop working folders for client projects — but only the creative grunt work. No sensitive client data. No accounting details. No personal information. Just the stuff that eats up hours if I do it manually.

Today, Co-Work is auditing my domain name registrations. I spend thousands on domains. Some are for clients and should be reimbursed. Some are 1am ideas that felt brilliant in the moment and look questionable by morning.

Co-Work is going through every single one. Working out what’s reimbursable. Flagging the ridiculous ones. Telling me which domains to keep and which to kill. That’s not a one-off task either. I’ve set up recurring scheduled jobs. Co-Work just runs them without me asking.

The problem is Fable. Fable is Claude’s most powerful model. It’s also the thirstiest thing I’ve ever paid for. My Fable credits burn faster than my bottle of wine on a Friday night. And trust me, that bottle doesn’t last long.

ChatGPT and Codex were way more generous. I could throw work at them all day and barely dent my usage. Fable feels like it’s charging me per thought.

Which is why, when a Chinese AI startup called Moonshot AI released a model called Kimi K3 last Thursday, I paid attention.

Same performance. A third of the price.

Kimi K3 performs at the level of Anthropic’s Fable 5. That’s the model I’m burning credits on right now. But Kimi K3 costs $15 per million output tokens. Fable 5 costs $50 for the same amount. Same ballpark of performance. A third of the price.

Let me put that in plain terms. If I’m spending $150 a month on Fable credits, switching to Kimi K3 could drop that to $50. For a small business, that’s real money over a year.

But the catch is me

I’m not just using Claude. I’m embedded in it. Co-Work is on my desktop. It’s connected to my accounting software, my client files, my scheduled tasks, my entire workflow. Switching models isn’t like changing browsers. It’s like moving houses.

And Kimi K3 is Chinese. Built in Beijing by a company called Moonshot AI. Which raises questions I don’t have answers to yet. Questions about data. About trust. About what happens to my information if I feed it through a model built in a country with very different data laws.

For the record, I don’t feed sensitive client data through any AI. Not Claude. Not ChatGPT. None of them. What goes through Co-Work is creative work. Image files. Social media content. Design tasks. The sensitive stuff stays offline and stays mine.

I don’t know if I’ll switch. I don’t even know if I should. But I know I can’t afford to ignore it.

This is Part 1 of a three-part series on Chinese AI models, pricing, and whether small businesses should care. Tomorrow I’ll break down the actual numbers. The token economics. Why Chinese models are so cheap. And what that means for your bottom line.

The China Question series

Part 2 — A Third of the Price. What’s the Catch with Chinese AI?

Part 3 — Should You Trust a Chinese AI With Your Business? I’m Genuinely Asking.

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