“Just Dropped” Was Nine Months Ago. Eleven Is Now Seventeen.
“Anthropic just dropped 11 free plugins for every job role… one for each job role. Sales, marketing, finance, legal and product management, each with its own plugin.”
Most claims on these cards take some work to check. This one does not, because the plugins live in a public repository with timestamps on it. So we opened it.
It was created on 23 January 2026. It was last updated today. And it holds seventeen Anthropic-built plugins, not eleven.
Source card: “Claude Plugins for every Job — 11 free plugins built for your actual job” — BANI Academy, 21 October 2026. Three steps: pick your role, skills inside, connect your tools.
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What the repository says right now
Everything below comes from anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins and its marketplace manifest, read on 22 October 2026.
| The card says | The repository says | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| “Just dropped” | Repository created 23 January 2026 | Nine months ago. It was accurate in late January |
| “11 free plugins” | 17 Anthropic-built plugin directories today | Eleven was the launch set. Six more have been added since |
| “one for each job role” | The marketplace manifest lists 123 plugins in total, most of them partner-built | The role idea is right; the scale is an order of magnitude out |
| “100% free” | Licence: Apache-2.0, public repository, 31,185 stars and 3,496 forks | Correct, and the most important claim on the card. This is open source, not a free tier |
| “Built on how Anthropic’s own team does these tasks” | The repository is Anthropic’s own, described as “primarily intended for knowledge workers to use in Claude Cowork” | Consistent with the source, and you can read the skills to judge for yourself |
Note what that table is not saying. Eleven was not invented. Eleven was the number on the day Anthropic published the set, and the reporting from that week says so. What has happened since is that the thing kept growing and the sentence did not.
“Just dropped” is the part that decays, and it decays in a way a star count or a price does not: a number can be stale and still be close, but a date word is either true this week or it is not.
The card names five of the seventeen
Here is the full set as it stands in the repository, with the five the card mentions marked.
| Plugin | Named on the card? | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| sales | Yes | Prep calls, summarise and follow up, research accounts, review deals and pipeline |
| marketing | Yes | Create content, plan campaigns, analyse performance, maintain brand |
| finance | Yes | Journal entries, reconciliation, financial statements |
| legal | Yes | Contract review, NDA triage, compliance workflows for in-house teams |
| product-management | Yes | Feature specs, roadmaps, synthesising user research |
| productivity | No | Tasks, planning your day, building memory of context about your work |
| enterprise-search | No | Search across email, chat and documents in one place |
| engineering | No | Standups, code review, architecture decisions, incident response |
| design | No | Critique, design system management, UX writing, accessibility audits |
| human-resources | No | Recruiting, onboarding, performance reviews, compensation analysis |
| operations | No | Vendor management, process documentation, change management |
| customer-support | No | Triage tickets, draft responses, escalate, build the knowledge base |
| data | No | SQL, dataset exploration, visualisations and dashboards |
| small-business | No | Pre-built workflows for running and growing a small business |
| bio-research | No | Literature search, genomics analysis, target identification |
| cowork-plugin-management | No | Create, customise and manage plugins for your own organisation |
| pdf-viewer | No | View, annotate and sign PDFs in a live viewer |
The two it leaves out are the two for everybody
Look at rows six and seven. productivity and enterprise-search are not job roles at all — they are the two plugins that apply whatever your job is.
“Manage tasks, plan your day, and build up memory of important context about your work” describes every knowledge worker alive. “Search across all of your company’s tools in one place — email, chat, documents” is the problem everybody in an organisation over about thirty people has.
So a card built on “pick your role” has, by its own framing, no slot for the two that are role-independent. And at the other end of the same list sits bio-research, which is for preclinical researchers and almost nobody else. The set is wider than the frame.
The same goes for cowork-plugin-management, which is the one that makes the others reproducible: it exists so an organisation can build and customise its own. That is arguably the most valuable entry in the whole repository for anyone running a team, and it is invisible from a card organised by job title.
“100% free” is the claim worth repeating
Most of the time, a card saying “free” means a free tier with a ceiling. Here it means something stronger and checkable: the plugins are in a public repository under the Apache-2.0 licence. You can read every skill before you install it, fork the lot, and change what you do not like. Thirty-one thousand people have starred it and three and a half thousand have forked it.
That matters more than the count. A plugin is a directory of instructions that runs with your permissions, and “you can read it first” is the difference between trusting a vendor and checking the work. We have been through what happens when you cannot.
How to check this yourself in two minutes
| Where | What you get | Why bother |
|---|---|---|
The repository — anthropics/knowledge-work-plugins |
The directory list, the licence, and the date of the last commit | The ground truth. A folder per plugin, with its skills in plain Markdown you can read |
/plugin in a terminal session, Discover tab |
What your account can actually install today | Availability varies by plan and by organisation policy. The repo tells you what exists; this tells you what you get |
The marketplace manifest in .claude-plugin/ |
Every listed plugin including partner-built ones — 123 of them today | Where the gap between “Anthropic built this” and “this is in the official marketplace” becomes visible |
Context cost, on the plugin’s page in /plugin |
An estimate of what it adds to every turn | An enabled plugin is part of every session, not just the ones you use it in |
The advice is better than the card knows
Here is the pleasant part of this particular correction. The card’s instruction is “pick your role’s plugin and go”, and that instruction has got more useful since it was written, not less.
In January, a designer, an engineer, an HR lead, a support manager, an analyst or someone running a small business opened the list and found nothing addressed to them. Today all six of those have a plugin. The number drifting from eleven to seventeen is the whole reason the advice now lands for more people.
So the fix is not to distrust the card. It is to stop reading the number and go and look, which is what its own fine print asks for: “Plugin names, availability and pricing come from the source and may change. Check Anthropic’s official site before you rely on them.”
Four honest caveats
- Seventeen is a directory count, not a definition. We counted top-level plugin folders in the repository, excluding the partner-built folder and the two dot-directories. Someone counting what their own
/pluginpanel offers will get a different and equally correct number. - We did not install any of them. This is a check of what exists and when it appeared, not a review of whether the sales plugin is good at sales.
- Availability is not the same as existence. Reporting from the launch describes these as paid-plan features, and organisations can restrict marketplaces. The repository being public does not mean every account can install from it.
- “Eleven” was true. Reporting from late January 2026 describes an initial set of eleven. The card is repeating a correct figure from a moment that has passed, which is a different fault from inventing one.
The one-line version
“Just dropped” points at 23 January 2026, eleven has become seventeen, the marketplace manifest now lists a hundred and twenty-three, and the two plugins the card has no slot for — productivity and enterprise search — are the two that fit every job on the list.
The “100% free” part is exactly right, and it is the part that lets you go and count for yourself.
Source card: “Claude Plugins for every Job” — BANI Academy, 21 October 2026.
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