How to connect Exa to Claude Cowork

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Introduction

Cowork is Anthropic's AI agent for knowledge work. Think of it as Claude Code for everything else. It works autonomously with your computer, local files, and applications to accomplish complex tasks.

This guide walks you through the easiest and most secure way to connect your Exa account to Cowork via Composio Connect, enabling it to summarize recent news articles on AI safety, find similar research papers to this URL, create a webset for quarterly sales data, and more such actions on your behalf without compromising your account security.

Also integrate Exa with

Connecting Exa to Claude Cowork

1. Open Customize

In Claude Desktop, click Customize in the left sidebar, then select Connectors and click the + icon at the top.

Claude Desktop connectors screen with Add custom connector selected

2. Add the Composio MCP server

Click Add custom connector and paste in the Composio MCP server URL:

bash
https://connect.composio.dev/mcp
Add custom connector dialog with Composio MCP server URL

3. Authorize in your browser

Click Connect. You'll be redirected to a browser window where you can authorize Composio to continue.

Composio authorization screen for Claude Cowork

4. Connect your Exa account

Back in Cowork, ask the agent to connect to Exa or give it any Exa-related task.

For example, ask Cowork to:

  • "Summarize recent news articles on AI safety"
  • "Find similar research papers to this URL"
  • "Create a webset for quarterly sales data"

It will prompt you to authenticate and authorize access.

That's it. Composio's tools are now available in Cowork, and your Exa account is ready to use.

What is Claude Cowork?

Claude Cowork is Anthropic's agent for general knowledge work. It can use your computer, files, and connected applications to complete longer-running tasks across your work tools.

With Composio Connect, Cowork can securely access apps like Exa through MCP without you sharing account credentials directly with the agent.

What is the Exa MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The Exa MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your Exa account. It provides structured and secure access to your Exa data platform, so your agent can perform actions like extracting answers from web data, running semantic searches, managing imports, and automating monitoring across your datasets.

  • Citation-backed question answering: Have your agent generate direct, source-cited answers or detailed summaries for your research questions using Exa’s advanced search.
  • Semantic similarity search: Quickly find web pages or documents that are semantically related to a given URL, complete with highlights or summaries for context.
  • Data import and webset management: Let your agent create, configure, or delete imports and websets to streamline data gathering and enrichment workflows.
  • Automated data monitoring: Schedule and manage monitors for websets to keep your data fresh and up-to-date with minimal manual intervention.
  • Event tracking and retrieval: Access a full history of system events or fetch details for specific events to stay on top of activity within your Exa environment.

Supported Tools & Triggers

Tools
Generate an answerGenerates a direct, citation-backed answer to a clear natural language question or topic using exa's search, adept at both specific answers and detailed summaries for open-ended queries.
Create ImportTool to create a new import to upload data into a webset.
Create a MonitorTool to create a new monitor.
Create WebsetTool to create a new webset with search, import, and enrichment setup.
Delete importTool to delete an existing import.
Delete websetTool to delete a webset.
Find similarFinds web pages semantically similar to a given url using embeddings-based search, optionally retrieving full text, highlights, or summaries for results.
Get contents from URLs or document IDsRetrieves configurable text and highlights from a list of exa document ids or publicly accessible urls.
Get EventTool to get details of a specific event by its id.
List eventsTool to list all events that have occurred in the system.
List importsTool to list all imports for the webset.
List webhooksTool to list all webhooks for websets.
SearchPerforms a web search using the exa engine, useful for queries requiring advanced filtering, specific content categories, or ai-optimized prompting.
Update importTool to update an import configuration by id.

How to build Exa MCP Agent with another framework

FAQ

What are the differences in Tool Router MCP and Exa MCP?

With a standalone Exa MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of Exa tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from Exa and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Can I use Tool Router MCP with Claude Cowork?

Yes, you can. Claude Cowork fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right Exa tools.

Can I manage the permissions and scopes for Exa while using Tool Router?

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which Exa scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

How safe is my data with Composio Tool Router?

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your Exa data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

Used by agents from

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Context
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Agent.ai
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Never worry about agent reliability

We handle tool reliability, observability, and security so you never have to second-guess an agent action.